Crossroads
by EastAnglia
Summary: AU. Alex finds herself pulled into another war-torn time and place, drawn to an all-too familiar man.
1. Chapter 1

TITLE: "Crossroads"  
FANDOM: Ashes to Ashes

RATING: M. Because there will be smut. And bad language.  
PAIRING: Alex/Gene  
GENRE: Romance/Angst

A/N: This? Is a really silly story. Maybe a little over the top, too. Don't expect too 's just a silly piece of angstfluff. But it's summertime, and I like trashy historical romances in the summertime! I hope it's not too weird.

xxXXxx

Voices, somewhere in the distance. Female, soft and muffled. A steady, mechanical pinging.

Her eyes drifted open. There was the white haze of the room, and the blur of two figures at the end of her bed. She peeled her dried, cracked lips apart and tried to speak, but it came out in a raspy moan.

"She's awake. Call the doctor," she heard someone say.

She blinked her eyes, and the room seemed to pop into focus. White, sterile walls. Machines and monitors.

_Hospital…I'm still in hospital…Molly…she was here...where is she?_

There was another figure there now. Male. White-coated, fiddling with wires and knobs above her head.

"Alex? Can you hear me?"

"Yes," she could hear herself say, dry and ragged.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Hospital...was shot..."

"That's right. But you're going to be all right, Alex."

"Wherezzz Molly?"

There was no answer. The doctor turned to the nurse and whispered. "Molly? Who's Molly?"

The nurse only shrugged, and then the realisation came. _1982._

_No...need Molly...need to find her_...

She tried to rise from the bed, her limp arms and legs moving uselessly under the covers, her lips unable to form the words.

"Alex! No, don't move...it's all right! _Nurse!_"

There was a flurry of movement. Arms pressing her against the bed, someone injecting something into her IV as she fought with what little strength she could muster. She began to drift again, and then: _Gene…where's Gene?_ She was gone, falling back into the stark white void.

She was aware of time passing. Hours, maybe. There was a series of fractured images. Voices. Distorted and distant, as if underwater. Doctors, nurses.

_Gene._

He was there. She could feel him. The way his presence filled a room. When she opened her eyes, it was dark. Shaz was there, sitting at her bedside, talking to her in a thin but even voice.

_Don't cry, Shaz. I'm going to be all right._ She wanted to say.

There was someone else there, leaning in the doorway. Slouched, head down. Gene. She willed herself to speak, to raise a hand toward him, but felt as if she were floating away, being pulled backward, and she didn't have the strength.

_Sleep...just need sleep..._

And she was gone.

When she opened her eyes again, daylight streamed in through the blinds, and she could hear the traffic noise from the street below. It was all real. The room, the walls. It was 1982. She was alive. Here. In hospital. Why was she here?

There was someone there, sitting in the chair at the end of her bed. It was Gene, looking disheveled and unshaven in his rumpled suit. He'd been there all night.

She let out a small noise, and his eyes snapped up from the floor. He jumped to his feet and sat on the edge of the bed next to her.

"Bolls…thank bloody Christ."

She looked at him sitting there. Relief on his rough, handsome face. He had spent the night with his long frame folded into the hard plastic chair; he was exhausted from lack of sleep and worry.

"I'm alive."

"Yeah. Y'are." He looked down and cleared his throat before he spoke. "I…I don't know what I would've done…" His voice trailed off.

A series of images shot through her brain, and she could feel the memories flooding back into her consciousness. Martin Summers, Gene, Jenette. The churchyard. Then the sharp awareness of the pain in her abdomen.

Her head was still fuzzy, and her voice slurred from the medication. "You _shot_ me."

"I know…I know. I'm sorry. It was…_Christ_, it was an accident, and I'm sorry, Bolly. It was an accident."

"I heard you…when I was out. I could hear you. Telling me to wake up. You yelled at me."

He looked away. "Yeah, well. Worked, didn't it? Had to get to you somehow."

"They think you tried to kill me."

He shook his head. "No. Jenette's in the nick. She told the truth about what happened. Stupid Irish tart. Finally does one decent thing in her life."

There was a silence. He ran one hand across the bed and folded his long fingers on top of hers. It was the smallest thing, but he had never touched here like that. She almost ached for him, but then she pulled her hand out from under his.

She had felt about him every emotion that it was possible to feel towards another person, but now she only wanted to feel nothing. Anything else hurt too much.

"Gene…" She struggled to sit up.

"No, don't talk. Doctor says you're meant to rest that gob of yours for once."

"No. I need to…what I told you..."

"Doesn't matter right now, Bolls. Doesn't matter," he interrupted. "That Boris bloke. He had you muddled. You didn't know if you were coming on or going."

So, that was it. He was going to dismiss the whole thing as the rantings of a confused woman. They would never, ever speak of it again, and things could go on like before.

But they couldn't. Things couldn't go on. Not like this. It was too awful. She wanted to say it, but the nurse came in again with a new bag for her IV. She was speaking in that chirpy way, words about her amazing progress and how she could go home soon and things could get back to normal.

It couldn't. They were broken. Gene had shot her, and that was the least of it.

"I'll just…go, then, Bolls." He rose from the bed and shuffled awkwardly, leaning down like he might kiss her forehead or squeeze her hand, but he just raised his shoulders and backed out of the room.

"He's been here the whole time," the nurse said with a bland smile after he left. "You're a lucky woman."

Alex only turned her head and looked out the window.

She was there for another couple of days. Doctors and nurses filed in and out, poked and prodded. She was healing well enough that she was released in a few days' time. The bullet hadn't hit anything vital. She was perfectly healthy. On the road to recovery. Time would heal all wounds.

She had sent Shaz round to her flat, and she sat now on the edge of her hospital bed wearing the clothes that Shaz had brought to her, her bloodied belongings in a paper sack on her lap.

There was a noise outside her room from the corridor, and he appeared in the doorway.

"Right." Gene breezed into her room rubbing his hands together. "Doctor says you're ready to go. I've got the Quattro parked in an 'ambulance only' spot, so shake a leg, Bolls."

"I don't want…" She bit at her lip and fought at the emotion in her voice. "_Shaz_ is taking me home, Guv."

"On _what?_ Bloody roller skates?"

"I've called a cab. It should be here any moment."

"Don't be daft, Bolls." He grabbed her bag and turned toward the door. "C'mon. Quattro's waiting."

There was part of her that wanted to throw her arms around him. To tell him she had made the whole stupid thing up, and they'd just forget all about it.

"No. I..._can't._"

He stood looking at her for a moment in incomprehension. Then his shoulders sank, and he dropped the bag gently in the chair by the door.

"It was an accident, Bolly," he said with pain in his voice. "I'd never hurt you."

_But you did. You __did__ hurt me,_ she wanted to say.

"I know the shooting was an accident. I do. But that's not it." She wiped at her eyes while he was looking away and took a steadying breath. "You didn't trust me, Gene. I don't know if I can…" She could barely breath under the full weight of what had happened. "You didn't _trust_ me_._"

"I didn't _trust_ you? I asked you to tell me the truth. 'S'all I wanted. You told me you were from the bloody future, and suddenly _I'm_ the bastard?!"

"I know you can't quite wrap your head round it. I'm not sure _I_ can. But I did tell you the truth!"

"Oh, well that's just bloody brilliant! Do you really think I'm that stupid?"

"I never betrayed you, Gene! Never. I was right about the King Douglas job, and you didn't trust me!"

"How was I supposed to believe anything that came out of your mouth? I was adrift. Mac, Chris. Nothing made sense anymore. You were the one person I thought I could trust. One person in this whole fucking city. You could've told me just about anything, but you _pissed_ on everything I believe in. So, tell me, Bolly. What was I supposed to do? Tell me, because _that's_ what I can't wrap my head round."

"_I don't know!_ Maybe...maybe I expected you to call someone to haul me away in a straitjacket. Or maybe I expected you to humour me. Maybe...just maybe I even expected you to believe me. What I didn't expect was for you to take my warrant card." She could feel tears well up in her eyes. It was the last bit that hurt so much. "What I didn't expect was for you to use my daughter against me."

He looked away with regret in his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Gene. I know it's hard to believe. I know I must've hurt you."

"Yeah, well, you _didn't_." He rose from the bed suddenly. "Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart."

He stood looking at her across the room, his face a mix of regret and pain and defiance. There was nothing more to be said.

"Cab's here, ma'am, I'll just…" Shaz stopped in the doorway when she saw Gene there. The air was thick, and her eyes grew wide. "Oh, sorry, Guv. I didn't know…"

"'S'All right, Shaz. I was just going," he said, but he didn't move.

She took a step in the room and crossed to Alex's bed. "Cab's here, ma'am. If you're ready."

Shaz reached out her hand and helped Alex to her feet. The pain flared, and she almost teetered backwards into the bed. "You all right?"

Alex nodded and tried to stand upright. She could sense her legs beneath her, weak and unsteady, and then they walked together slowly to the door. When she looked up, Gene was gone.

"That's it, ma'am," Shaz murmured softly. "Nice and slow."

xxXXxx

Shaz had come in and tidied up while she was in the hospital. The breakfast dishes from the day she was shot had been washed and set in the drainer. There was still a bottle on the counter, with the last few drops of wine in the bottom. It was left over from the night he had staggered here half drunk. "You and me, Bolly," he had toasted her. She shuddered at the memory.

"Doctor says you're to have one of these now and one in four hours if you wake up," Shaz said setting her bottle of pain pills on the counter next to the bottle. "And you're meant to drink it with a full glass of water, so I'll bring you a glass for beside your bed, all right?"

"Thanks, Shaz," Alex said and stood motionless in the middle of the room.

Shaz came in and handed her two pills and a glass of water, and she swallowed them down.

"I put out some pyjamas for you when I was here earlier. They're on your bed. I thought you'd probably want to just go right to sleep."

"Yeah, yeah. I do." She already felt like curling up and sleeping for the next week. "Thanks."

"I know it's not my business, ma'am. But the Guv…"

"Please, Shaz." Alex snapped her eyes shut. "I don't want to talk about the Guv. Not now."

Shaz nodded in understanding. "All right, ma'am. I'll just be here on the sofa, if you need me."

Alex nodded and headed slowly into her room with one hand protectively pressed against her middle, looking forward to nothing more than the emptiness of sleep.

It was dark when she awoke at some point in the night. Medicine. She was meant to take medicine. She rummaged on the bedside table for the water and pills Shaz had said she would leave, but there was nothing. Her head throbbed.

"Shaz?" Alex tried to call out, but her own voice sounded weak and distant. She tried to sit up, but a pain shot through her side, and she let out a startled noise of hurt.

She lifted herself from the bed and tried to stand, but her legs buckled underneath her. She managed to right herself and took a few halting, panicky steps across the floor.

Something was wrong. This hurt too much, and she felt as if she were burning with fever. She could just make out the sound of the voices from the other room. It was a man's voice, and for a moment, she thought it must be Gene.

"Shaz! Anybody!"

She felt her way along the wall, hand over hand, until she reached the living room. Images flickered in the darkness. Old maps and faded, jerky newsreels. Not Gene at all, but some war documentary. Shaz had fallen asleep on the sofa.

She staggered into the kitchen and grabbed the pill bottle with a shaky hand and tried to struggle with the child-safety lid. "Shaz…please. Help me," she said. She could barely hear herself. "Please...help me."

In the other room, Shaz had awakened and was rubbing her eyes sleepily. There was a loud noise, some kind of explosion as the war raged on the TV, and it briefly lit up the room. "Are you all right?" Shaz asked in alarm when she saw her, and she rose quickly from the sofa.

"Something's wrong." Alex had one hand pressed against her wound as Shaz crossed to her. She reached out her hand, but suddenly Shaz seemed far away, at the wrong end of the telescope.

"Ma'am? What is it? What's wrong?"

She could feel herself begin to fall, almost in slow motion. The medicine bottle fell from her hand and dropped to the floor next to her, sending the little pills rolling across the carpet.

Shaz was kneeling on the floor next to her. Her lips were moving, but no sound came. Alex could see the television glowing over Shaz's shoulder. It seemed to fill the room now, hot and blinding. Then Shaz was gone, swallowed up by it.

And then there was nothing.

"Are you all right, miss? Can you hear me?"

It was Shaz's voice again, strong and clear. Alex opened her eyes. The first thing she was aware of was that the searing pain in her side was gone, replaced by a sort of dizzy, queasy haze.

"Yes, Shaz. I'm fine actually." There was a figure above her, blurring in and out of focus.

"You haven't eaten all day, have you? Remember Matron told you to eat to keep your strength up."

_Matron_? She didn't remember anything like that. And what was that smell? The sickly sweet smell of chloroform and antiseptic.

Everything still seemed to be lost in a white glare. She pulled herself up to sitting, her voice rising in panic. "Where am I? Oh, God, I'm in hospital, aren't I?"

"Well…_of course_," Shaz said, wrinkling her forehead.

"What's happened to me? Am I dying?"

"You fainted is all, miss"

She blew out a chestful of air in relief. "I fainted. I fainted. That's all."

"Are you _sure_ you're all right? Maybe you hit your head when you fell."

Alex blinked her eyes hard into focus. Shaz was kneeling next to her. The jeans and t-shirt she had been wearing had been replaced by a calf-length blue dress and white apron. Her hair was tucked up under some kind of cap with a long veil.

"Shaz…what are you…were you wearing that before? Where did you get that?"

Shaz only shook her head. "I'm calling Matron. You're not well, miss."

Alex could feel her heart begin to pound as she looked around in mounting fear. The walls of her flat were gone. She was lying at the foot of the stairs in the entrance way of some grand house. Windows looked out not onto the street below but a green lawn that stretched into the distance. The windows had been criss-crossed with strips of tape.

"Oh, God. Oh, God, no…"

"Matron!"

"No, no…God, no…this can't be happening…Please, Shaz. Help me!" She reached out and gripped at Shaz's arms as the girl tried to struggle away.

"_Matron!_"

"Please!" Alex called out to anyone who would listen. "Somebody! _Please!_…help me!"

A stout, stern woman in her forties appeared at their side and pried Shaz's arms from Alex's grip. "What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know. She fainted all of the sudden."

"Please…I don't belong here! I shouldn't be here…I need to go home. Please, help me!"

The Matron gave a disapproving click of the tongue. "Why do they insist on sending me these girls?" she muttered. "You volunteered for this, Nurse Drake. It's too late to go home now."

"No! No! I'm not a nurse! This isn't real! You don't understand! This can't be happening!"

Shaz and the Matron only exchanged weary looks. "Of course you don't feel like a nurse, but you will do. And soon," she said briskly and turned to Shaz, whispering under her breath. "Another green recruit. Go and fetch her some tea and biscuits from my office, Nurse Granger."

Shaz nodded, but before she could go, there was a rush of noise outside. A vehicle approaching, the sound of feet scrambling on the gravel outside. Frantic voices, one rising above the rest, somehow familiar.

"We've got a wounded man! We need help! _Now_!"

Shaz and the Matron scrambled to their feet, leaving Alex still sprawled on the floor.

The front door flung open. Two men carried another man in on a litter, and there was a sudden rush of movement and voices. Shaz directed them down the corridor while the wounded man moaned in pain, and the two nurses hurried off with the men.

Alex sat there leaning back on her palms and blinking in disbelief in the silence that followed. Another man came in through the open door then; she could see the toes of his laced boots as he strode through and stopped there in the doorway. Her eyes moved up his form.

He was standing there with a long-legged swagger, wearing a battered uniform of dark wool. Boots, puttees, trousers, buttoned tunic. His face was barely visible through the spatter of mud and dark, caked blood.

But it was him. _Gene._

He looked down at her, his lip curling in contempt as she sat open-mouthed staring up at him from the floor. "Oi! _You! _Follow me!" He turned and strode off in the direction of the others.

She picked herself up and numbly followed after him. There was a desk by the front door, and her eye fell on the French language newspaper that had been folded and left there. Her fingers shook as she ran her hand over the print to the date in the corner.

_3 Juin 1917._

She closed her eyes and leaned against the desk for a moment to steady herself. And then she stumbled along after the others down the long, dark corridor.

END CHAPTER ONE


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Sorry. It's graphic. But I promise it won't be wall-to-wall unremitting angst. Really. And there will be smut. Just not yet. :)

xxXXxx

**CHAPTER** **TWO**

She followed the sound of the wounded man's moans down the corridor as it opened onto another room. It had probably been a formal dining room in another, more peaceful time, but now it was lined with metal-framed beds, filled with men in various states of consciousness.

The smell of the antiseptic barely covered the odor of burnt flesh, and she clapped a hand over her mouth as she stumbled into the room. They had laid the soldier out on an examination table, and a doctor now hovered over him. There were voices, sharp movement, all in a kind of ordered chaos, and she was lost in it.

Landmine…morphine…amputation…ether…

Gene stood at the end of the table with the two men who had carried the litter in. It was Chris and Ray, of course, and the three of them looked on with expressions of weariness and resignation.

As she inched closer, she could see that the man's left leg was gone. Shaz was removing the sodden bandages from his middle, and Alex fought against the waves of nausea. There was nothing there. A black and purple mass of blood and flesh.

The man began to struggle against them, his remaining limbs twisting in pain, and the doctor turned to her as she stood there dumbly.

"You, girl! Don't just stand there!"

She staggered forward to the side of the table. The soldier looked up at her with terrified eyes, only half-seeing, and grabbed her forearm with a bloodied hand.

"You're going to be all right," she choked helplessly. He wouldn't be, and even she knew that. The doctor called out orders in his clipped voice. They passed instruments, gauze and syringes, all in vain. His grip on her wrist began to weaken, and Alex watched as a froth of dark blood bubbled from his mouth, and the life in his eyes flickered out.

"Damn." It was all the doctor said. He pulled off his gown, and glanced down at his pocket watch. "Time of death 1830." Then he was gone, rubbing with fatigue at his neck and shoulders.

The others drifted away. Matron, Chris and Ray. Alex stood there, unable to move, as Shaz returned instruments to trays and threw bloodied bandages into a bag to be washed and reused. Finally she closed the young man's lifeless eyes and pulled a sheet over his body.

"You'll need to change your clothes, miss," Shaz said softly. "There's a uniform in the wardrobe. Our room is at the very top of the stairs on the left."

She was gone then, and only she and Gene were there, looking down on the still body of the soldier. She could sense him looking at her, and she glanced up at him through tear-filled eyes.

"It gets easier," he said.

She bit at her lip for a moment. "I hope not."

And then he was gone, too, his boots falling gently against the hardwood floor. She finally found her feet and dragged herself up two flights of stairs to the little room she apparently was to share with Shaz. There were two narrow beds there and a shared wardrobe and a writing desk.

She sat there on thin mattress of the bed for a long moment, too numb to move, before rising to the wardrobe. Her nurse's uniform, identical to the one Shaz wore, was hanging there. Blue dress, apron, nurse's kerchief that tied at the back of the neck. The ridiculous pink frock she'd arrived in was covered in blood, and there was the imprint of the soldier's hand on her sleeve. She pulled the thing off and balled it up on the floor of the wardrobe.

She could see them out the tiny window as she dressed. Chris and Ray digging a fresh grave in the little cemetery with even lines of white crosses. Gene was there, too, standing at a distance with his head down, hands in his pockets.

She had seen death before. She had watched her parents die, _twice._ Worked the most gruesome crime scenes. But she couldn't shake the image of the life draining out of the young man's eyes as she held his hand.

The familiar faces of the others were some comfort, but she was a stranger to them. She was alone here, wherever here was. It didn't matter. _This_ was real now. The stench, the fear.

She splashed tepid water from the basin on her face and headed back down the stairs. There was movement, a shapeless form in the corner by the door, and then the sound of a woman's muffled laughter.

"Who is it? Is someone there?"

Shaz stepped out of the dark corner, followed by Chris. They both looked up at her, startled and sheepish. "Please don't tell Matron, miss. She says we're not to fraternise."

"It's all right, miss." Chris offered. "We're engaged and all."

"Don't worry. I won't tell, Shaz." She gave them a small smile.

Shaz smiled in relief. "Thanks, miss."

"Why's she calling you _Shaz?_" Chris whispered. Shaz elbowed him in the ribs.

"I think that's the way smart people talk."

"Sorry. _Sharon_. And please. Call me Alex."

"Oh, but you're…and I'm… I couldn't," she said uneasily.

"I insist. We're equals here. I'm not your superior."

"Well, all right. If that's what you'd like, miss."

Alex sighed and headed down the stairs and outside. The late spring air was cool as she crossed the lawn and tried to get her bearings. It was 1917, she knew that, and she tried desperately to search through the dim corners of her mind for the significance of the date. She couldn't remember anymore when the war had even started. Was it 1914 or 1915? It had always seemed sort of silly and remote to her. Another place and time altogether when men still foolishly rode into battle on horseback.

She was in some kind of chateau near the French-Belgian border. There was a village in the distance, and from it, a country road rose and passed in front of the house. Signposts at the crossroad there gave the distance to Ypres and Verdun and farther on to Calais.

The light was fading, and the sun seemed to be suspended there, a red and orange glow just over the horizon. She found a bench under a tree and watched it as it hung there.

She was aware that Gene was with her then, crossing the lawn towards the tree. He stood next to her, and they watched the glow in the distance.

"You all right?"

She nodded up and down vigorously as if to convince herself. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a flask. He unscrewed the top and took a sip before passing it to her. She raised it to her mouth with a shaking hand and took in a mouthful, feeling the welcome burn on the back of her throat.

"Who was he? The young man?"

"Manchester lad. Nineteen. I knew his dad," he said evenly. "I'll have to write him. Tell him his son died a hero's death for King and Country." He pulled a cigarette case and lighter from the pocket of his tunic.

"Do you really believe that?"

"I have to. Don't you?"

They stood in the silence before he turned to her, looking her over as if he were trying to work something out. "Have we met before?"

She smiled softly. "In another life, maybe."

He shrugged and lit the cigarette. "Didn't think so. Can't imagine a bloke like me crossing paths with someone like you."

"You'd be surprised, Captain Hunt." She could feel her eyes well up again at the familiar teasing in his voice. "It _is_ Captain Hunt, isn't it?"

"Captain Gene Hunt. Third Manchesters." He crossed and sat next to her on the bench. She passed him back his flask, and he drank again.

"Alex Drake."

"Alex. Like in Alexandra. Like the queen."

"Yes, I imagine so."

"Queen Alexandra." He looked her up and down with a smile curling on his lips. "Suits you."

She held his eyes for a moment. It really was him. She could see him now that he'd washed the blood and dirt from his face. Thinner, battle-weary. His hair was shorter than before. But it was him, dressed in the uniform of an infantry officer. "You're an officer. I wouldn't have thought…I mean you're not…" She stopped herself.

"Not what? Not a gentleman? Battlefield commission. They were running out of warm bodies." He took a long sip from the flask. "That's what happens when you send public schoolboys to do a man's job." There was no bravado in his voice, only sadness.

"What are we doing here?" she asked almost dreamily as she looked at him through narrowed eyes.

"I'm keeping the world safe from the Boche, me," he said with an ironic snort. "More like what're _you_ doing here? Nice girl like you. You're all Port Out, Starboard Home, you are. How'd you end up here?"

"That's what I'm trying to work out, Captain Hunt."

They sat there for a time, sipping and smoking. She looked out at the lingering sunset. "It's beautiful."

"What is?"

"The sunset."

He took a long drag from the cigarette and stubbed the end out on the ground. "That's east," he said heavily. "The sun doesn't set in the east."

It wasn't the sunset at all, but the war, raging just over the horizon. Men were dying there in filth and terror for no good reason she could remember. She looked away.

He rose to his feet and turned back toward the house. "Where are you going? You're not leaving are you?" she asked. She winced at the thin, panicky pitch to her voice.

"Well, I was going for a bit of a jimmy riddle," he said with a smirk. He leaned down close to her ear. "But you're welcome to come'n give me a hand, Your Majesty."

She rolled her eyes and rose from the bench. "It's getting cold anyway." They walked together back toward the house and in through the kitchen. Chris and Ray were sitting there with cups of tea on their knees, and Shaz was doling out biscuits from a tin.

They jumped up and saluted when Gene entered, sending Chris' cup onto the floor. He bounced from foot to foot in mild pain as the liquid seeped through the leg of his trousers.

Gene returned with a lazy salute, and the men sunk back into their chairs with exhaustion.

"We were wondering, sir," started Chris, looking back and forth between Ray and Shaz, "If we could billet here for the night."

"Only, I've had a look at Corporal Skelton's feet, sir" Shaz said with hesitation. "For medical purposes only, mind you. And I think he's got the early signs of trench foot. He really should stay here for the night, sir, so's his feet can dry out."

"I told you to change your socks at least twice a day, corporal," Gene barked.

"Sorry, sir."

"Sgt Carling…"

"Sir?"

"You're now responsible for the state of Corporal Skelton's feet. Whale-oil rub every night. Under your loving and delicate touch."

"But, sir!"

"That's an order, sergeant. His feet fall off, it's a firing squad for you."

"Yes, sir," Ray grumbled. Chris and Ray looked at each other distastefully, and the three of them shuffled off.

"You'll leave tomorrow. Won't you?" she asked him when the others had gone.

"Reckon so. Back to the trenches. Duty calls."

She blinked back tears. "Will you be back?"

"You never know." He rocked back on his heels and stood looking at her, searching her face in the half-light. "You sure we haven't met before?"

"You never know."

He smiled, and they stood there wordlessly for a moment. "'Night, Your Majesty."

"Good night, Captain Hunt."

She turned and headed up to her room, barely able to lift her feet from one stair to another. She slipped into a nightgown and slid under the thin covers with the moonlight drifting in through the small window.

There were no radios or monitors here for communication from another time. At least in 1982, there had been familiar points of reference. She had lived it all before. Here, everything was alien, and men by the thousands were dying only miles away.

It was like some surreal nightmare. Somewhere in two different times she was lying in a hospital bed fighting for her life, and somehow, she had ended up here, far from home.

But there was Gene. Summers was right. He was her rock, her constant. _Gene_. And he was leaving tomorrow.

She closed her eyes tight and willed herself to sleep.

**END CHAPTER TWO**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** This chapter is a respite before the heat of battle begins in future chapters.

Thanks to louella for the advice! And thanks to all for R&Ring.

**CHAPTER THREE**

"Time to wake up."

It was Shaz's voice, reaching her from somewhere outside her dream. It was gone now, lost and forgotten, but as she stretched herself awake, the dream had left her feeling warm and content. Still half-asleep, she could see Shaz leaning over the bed, and she wondered just how late for work she was and how on earth Shaz had got into her flat.

"Come on, miss. It's five o'clock," Shaz said more urgently. "Breakfast before early rounds. Matron'll be cross if we're late."

_Oh, God, no…_

She sat upright with a gasp, fully awake now, heart pounding. Not 1982 at all.

"Didn't mean to startle you, miss." Shaz was standing over her, already dressed in her uniform.

"It's all right." Alex threw back the covers and sat at the edge of the bed, taking even breaths to try and steady herself. "I was just…dreaming."

"You must've been." Shaz had turned to the mirror and was straightening her nurse's cap. "You were talking in your sleep."

"Was I?"

"Mmm-hmmm. Who's Gene? Is that your young man?"

"No, he's…nothing, nobody."

"Captain Hunt's Christian name is Gene," Shaz offered.

"Is it? I hadn't realised." She pulled her uniform from the wardrobe and turned back to face Shaz with a practiced look of nonchalance. Shaz was still at the mirror fussing with her hair and cap. Her eyes were dark and red-rimmed.

"What's wrong? Are you all right?"

Shaz turned to her, head down. "Every time he goes, I think it'll get easier. But it never does."

Alex turned quickly to the window to see the empty space where the ambulance had been parked the day before. "They've gone, haven't they?"

Shaz nodded, her chin quivering.

"But they'll be back, won't they? They _will_ come back."

"Sometimes they get twenty-four passes, and they come into the village." Shaz smiled shyly. "That's how we met, me and Chris."

Shaz burst into tears, and Alex slipped a comforting arm around her. "Then they'll be back. We have to believe that."

There was a rushed breakfast of tea and toast in the kitchen before they hurried into the foyer. Matron was standing there at the foot of the stairs with her hands clasped under her impressive bosom. She said nothing but glanced down at the watch pinned to her apron to let them know they were slightly late.

There was a lecture for Alex's benefit as they headed toward the ward. Men wounded at the front were taken to aid stations just behind the lines, she explained, where medics patched them up as best they could. If they survived, they were brought to makeshift hospitals for further treatment by doctors.

Severely injured men were sent home to recuperate. Those with less serious injuries were sent to hospitals like this one, where they would stay for days or weeks until the doctor pronounced them healed. And then they would be shipped back to the front and the cycle would begin again.

This was mostly a convalescent hospital, but sometimes, like the day before, wounded men would be brought here. During a particularly bloody offensive, they could see as many as 300 wounded soldiers in a day. Some of them lived. Most of them didn't.

Alex's duties would be to bathe them, shave them, feed them if necessary. Help them write letters home. Keep up morale with some small talk and harmless flirtation.

"They're frightened young men far from home. All they want is a kind word and a smile from a pretty girl," Matron said as they stopped in the doorway of the ward. "They _will _fall in love with you. If that gives them some comfort and hope, then so be it. But don't fall in love with them, Nurse Drake." She looked out on the row of beds. "You will only have your heart broken."

Matron left them there, and Shaz was off taking temperatures and changing bandages in her ever brisk, efficient way. There were men with terrible burns, wounds, bandages soaked through with dark blood. She couldn't breathe from the smell.

She stood there helplessly, arms hanging limply to her sides until she could hear one of the men call out for a nurse in a ragged voice. There was a young man in the first bed, hands and eyes bandaged.

She staggered over to his bed and found her mouth had gone dry. She had to peel her tongue from the roof. "Can I get you something?"

"Water," he croaked with effort.

There was a glass beside his bed, and she helped him up to sitting while he drank and then collapsed against the bed as if the effort had exhausted him.

"Thank you," he said and even in his state, he managed a smile.

"You're welcome," she said tearily, setting the glass back down on the table.

"I'm called George."

"I'm Alex."

"I think you must be an angel of mercy, Alex." And then his eyes fluttered shut, and he was asleep again.

It was like that all day and in the days that followed. Changing bedpans, writing home to mums and sweethearts. Meals, when she could find the time, were nothing more substantial than a piece of fruit, cheese, and tea, all eaten standing over the sink or running back and forth from the ward, and after a week here, her uniform had begun to hang from her shoulders. She and Shaz would drag themselves exhausted to bed every night, soaking their blistered and bloodied feet.

She found herself losing track of the days, and when she passed by the mirror, she barely recognised herself now with the hollowed cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. She had that same look on her face that she had seen on the young men when they were deemed healthy enough to go back to the front. The haunted look of desperation.

At least it kept her thinking too much of the nightmare of her situation. She missed him, too, not just DCI Gene Hunt, but this Captain Hunt, and the familiarity of him, the tentative bond they had managed to form. At night, lying in bed, she could hear Shaz weeping softly for Chris, and Alex had cried her own tears for Gene.

She had given up trying to work out how she could get back to 1982 let alone 2008. She had thought once that Layton's bullet had sent her back to 1981 so some lesson could be learned, some wrong righted. She had tried in vain to save her parents, thinking it would be her way home. She had managed to foil Operation Rose, but she had only wound up with a bullet in her side, lost in another nightmarish coma. No, there was nothing she could do to propel herself forward in time again. Perhaps that was the only lesson in this, but it made it no easier to prise her eyes open in the morning in some small, vain hope, only to find the sun coming in the window of the little attic window. She could only move through the days. Waiting.

Summer came a few weeks after her arrival in 1917, but warmer weather didn't follow. The morning air was still crisp and cool. She had fallen into a kind of numb routine with her patients, and in turn, they had all been released except for her young soldier George. He continued to improve, and she was there when the doctor removed the bandages from his face and hands, and she cried happy tears for him when he announced that he could see.

He was about to be released, and she felt a small measure of satisfaction that she had managed to be of some use here. She wasn't just stumbling alone and helpless through a nightmare. And then he spiked a fever one afternoon. Higher and higher. At first only 100, and nothing to worry about. And then 103, 104, and the doctor shook his head gravely.

"Infection. We'll know more in the morning. If he makes it."

"But...there must be something you can do…some medication…" she said as she he turned and walked out of the ward.

"I'm sorry, Nurse Drake," he said, not uncaring, but resigned, and then he was gone.

She sat by his bedside that evening as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Shaz appeared after the lights in the ward had been dimmed, carrying a cup of tea for her.

"You should go to bed, miss. There's nothing you can do," she said sympathetically.

"No. I should be here. In case…in case he wakes up," she said. "He shouldn't be alone."

She watched him as his eyes twitched feverishly beneath his lids, pressing a damp cloth to his forehead. She meant to stay that way all night, but exhaustion overtook her, and when her eyes opened again, the sun was just coming up, and she could hear the sound of birdsong.

Her eyes fell hopefully onto the bed, where the young soldier looked up at her unseeingly.

She called out in a panic for Shaz and the Matron, who were just coming into the ward, and she tried with her dormant first aid knowledge to revive him, pressing on his chest in vain. Matron gently moved her aside and pressed her fingers against his wrist.

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, Nurse Drake."

Alex hurried out of the ward and staggered outside into the daylight. She wrapped her arms around her middle as her body pitched with sobs, for herself as much as for the lost soldier.

She was aware of movement on the road up from the village. A farmer's hay wagon, twisting slowly up the hill towards the house. And then as it grew closer, she could see more than hay piled up in the wagon. Three figures sat in the back, laughing and talking. Gene, Chris, and Ray, and when she saw them she spontaneously lifted her arm and waved.

Shaz had seen them from the window, and she came tearing across the lawn, flinging herself into Chris' arms, where he twirled her dizzily, her feet flying off the ground.

"All right, all right, enough of that," Ray grumbled, but then she had a hug for him even. He grimaced but blushed all the same, and the three of them headed up toward the house with a crate of green-bottled Belgian beer.

Alex turned to Gene with a smile, and he stood there with his hat pushed back from his face.

"Well, if it isn't HM Nurse Drake."

"What, the lovely ladies of the village couldn't entice you to stay there for your twenty-four hour pass?"

"The 'lovely ladies of the village' are all trembling virgins or else they've got more whiskers on their chin than my old grand-dad." She smiled at him, but he looked at her with concern. "Y'okay?"

She returned a weary smile. "Fine."

They headed up the lawn, ambling silently towards the back of the house. Chris was carrying Shaz on his back as she shrieked with laughter. Ray had opened a bottle and was lying on the lush green grass with his face tipped toward the sun.

The back lawn was bordered by a grove of trees, and as they reached the house, Gene took a turn and headed into the woods. He said nothing; there was only the briefest glance over his shoulder at her, but she knew she was meant to follow. She pushed aside the low branch of a tree, and they were swallowed up by the woods.

It was thick with leaves and the dark, earthy smell of the forest. She could hear up ahead the sound of water where a river had trickled down to the stream. They walked on in silence. She plucked a flower from an unruly bush and rolled the stem casually between her fingers.

"Are you married, Captain Hunt?"

"Why, you interested?"

She let out an airy laugh. "Certainly not. Curious, that's all."

"Was."

She chanced another question. "What happened?"

"Went home on leave last year, and she'd run off with the milkman," he said. "You? Is there a Mr Queen Alexandra?"

"No. I am currently without a consort." She smiled wryly.

"No young man back home?"

"Hardly."

"Some Royal Flying Corps Old Etonian?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Not really my sort of man."

"What is your sort of man, then?"

"Now who's interested?"

"Just wondering why a smart girl like you lets herself wander off unchaperoned with a bloke like me."

"Should I be worried about my virtue, Captain Hunt?"

"I dunno. Maybe. Depends on how virtuous you want to be."

They came to a clearing where the water spilled over the rocks and down into a small pond. Without a word, he began to unbutton his tunic.

"What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?"

"You wouldn't."

"I would."

His tunic came off, followed by his boots and trousers until he was down to a set of baggy, white, army-issue drawers. She laughed and perched herself on a boulder at the edge of the pond as he dove in and came back up again, spouting a mouthful of water.

He stood waist-deep, making circles in the water with his hands. He was leaner than the Gene Hunt she had first met, more gaunt even than when she'd seen him several weeks earlier.

"How bad is it? _Out there_." she asked quietly.

He frowned, and it was a moment before he spoke. "I've been through the Somme, sweetheart. Anything else is a Sunday School picnic."

She noticed then a jagged line that ran from above his right hipbone and then disappeared below the waistband of his pants. "The Somme. Is that where you got that?" she asked with a nod of her head.

"Shot in the gut last year."

"Yes. I know that feeling."

She wrapped her arms around her knees, and he looked at her with a smile of disbelief. "Bloody hell. You've been shot? What happened? Bullet go astray at a pheasant hunt?"

"No. It was an accident. A man I knew. I was...." She stopped herself. "Never mind. It doesn't matter."

"You were what?"

She pulled her legs closer to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. "I was in love with him, I think," She said wistfully. She thought back to Gene's words in his office -- _I thought we were the ones _-- and a shiver ran through her. "I don't know. Maybe in spite of everything, I still am."

She looked at him with tears in her eyes, willing him to know her. There was a flicker of something on his face. Recognition? Sympathy? Then it was gone. "Blimey. Man you're in love with shoots you? I thought _I_ had it tough."

He dunked himself under the surface again. There was only the sound of the water bubbling over the rocks and the birds in the trees. He came back up and sent a splash of water up towards her.

"You could join me, you know."

She sat on the rock trying to think of a hundred witty things she could say, but instead she found herself reaching out and unlacing her shoes. He looked at her, his eyes growing large when he realised she was about to take him up on his half-joking invitation. She could feel his eyes on her as she stood and reached up under her dress, one stocking unsapped from the garter and then another. She slowly unrolled one stocking down past the knee, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down as she exposed a flash of thigh. She looked up at him then. His eyes lingering on her bare legs, and then they moved up to her own eyes. A smile curled across her mouth, but he cleared his throat and looked away as if his sense of propriety called for it. She came down off the rock, but she caught him looking back on her appreciatively as she waded in to her knees with her dress and apron bunched mid-thigh.

He waded to the edge of the water to meet her with his wet drawers clinging to his skin, and they walked slow circles around each other.

"So, this bloke. The one shot yer."

"What about him?"

"Well, I'd say you need to find yourself a new man."

"And what sort of man would that be? A Mancunian infantry officer with appallingly bad language?"

"You could do worse for yourself." She supposed he had meant it to be full of his usual bravado, but there was a hint of vulnerability in his voice that startled her. He looked away then for a moment as if he were making a decision about something important, and then turned back to her with a brash smile. "Imagine you walking into the Royal Box at Ascot on my arm. Queen Mary's teeth'd fall out."

"The world is changing, Captain Hunt. Things will be different after the war. Class, status...it won't matter as much."

"Oh, you some sort of fortune teller now? You've got a crystal ball up under that skirt?"

"Something like that."

"And what's it say 'bout you and me, eh?"

She smiled slyly. "It says that although I am above you in status right now, in future our roles will be reversed."

"That so? How long do I have to wait 'til you're underneath me?"

She waded up out of the water with a smile. "Don't hold your breath, captain."

He came out of the water behind her and sat on the bank. A shaft of bright sunlight was coming in through the trees, and he stretched himself out to dry with his fingers laced behind his head. They sat in comfortable silence for a moment.

"Did you ever think about it? Time. How it works, what it all means?"

"Yeah, I'm a regular philosopher, me," he snorted with sarcasm. "We hold fortnightly salons out in the trenches, me and the lads do."

"What if...what if time isn't what we think it is?" She held out one stocking in front of her, each end stretched out between thumb and forefinger. "We think of time like this. A straight line. But what if it isn't?" She balled up the stocking and cupped it in the palms of her hands. "What if it's more like this?"

"I think I have no idea what you're on about," he said, not without affection.

It was foolish. She wasn't even sure why she was telling him this. He hadn't believed her in 1982. Why on earth would he believe her now? But she went on. "You said before you thought we'd met before. Maybe time isn't a straight line at all. What if everything...past, present, future, is happening all at once, but sometimes things bleed through. Like wallpaper from under a new coat of paint. Maybe on the other side of time, we _have_ meet. Maybe we're even...lovers."

He rolled over onto one side and propped himself up on his elbow. Her skirt was still tucked up around her knees, and his eyes travelled up and down her form.

"You and me? Lovers? I think I'd remember that," he said huskily. "I know _you_ would."

She couldn't pull her eyes away from his for a moment. Finally, he looked away and grabbed his things, pulling on his trousers and boots.

"We should get back," she said, her lips somehow having trouble forming the words. He nodded, and she hurried off through the trees as he followed a few paces behind.

xxXXxx

After evening rounds, Alex and Shaz headed back out onto the back terrace. The men had given up on football and were attempting to play cricket with a small head of cabbage and a plank of wood until Matron came out and scowled at them silently.

The sun was beginning to dip in the sky when Chris and Shaz came out of the house with a table-top victrola and a stack of records left behind by the absent owners.

"Look what we found!" Shaz said. "Quite a collection!"

She slipped "Alexander's Ragtime Band" onto the turntable, and she and Chris stumbled and laughed as she tried to teach him the Turkey Trot or the Castle Walk or one of those old dances.

They sat there in the warm summer air listening to records. French _chansons_, American ragtime. Dancing, laughing, drinking. The sun was gone, and the sky glowed a deep blue. A quiet melancholy had settled on them, and they sat listening to the music and the sound of the buzz of insects. Shaz put the last record on. There was the crackle and hiss of the victrola and then the sound of tinny trumpets and weepy violins. Shaz floated across the terrace and curled up on Chris' lap while Ray sang along in a slurry but surprisingly tuneful voice.

Gene had slipped away at some point. Alex pulled herself to her feet and crossed the terrace to the French doors that opened into the house. She could see the outline of him in the moonlight. He was sitting brooding at the table. Feet up, drinking straight from a bottle of wine. Fag smoke wreathed his head. He could have been sitting in his office or the corner at Luigi's, and she ached from the familiarity of it.

The trust between them was shattered in 1982, but this was another time and place. She had ceased to even begin to understand why she was here, _how_ she was here, but as she stood there watching him in the half-light, she wondered if she dared open the door on Gene Hunt when she had closed it so firmly against him in another time.

She crossed to him and sat on the edge of the desk.

He drank from the bottle and looked out the French doors. "Poor bastards. They have no idea."

"You know something, don't you?"

He drank again before speaking. "There's an offensive planned. We're meant to take some strip of land no bigger than Trafalgar Square. One last push to break the Germans and end the war by Christmas," he said bitterly. "Christ, why the bloody hell am I telling you this?"

"Because you trust me," she found herself saying out loud.

"There's a chance…" he began again. "I won't be back."

"Don't say that."

"Some bloody village. _Passchendaele._" He emptied the bottle, and a chill ran through her.

_Passchendaele._ Her fleeting knowledge of it was enough. One of the bloodiest battles of the war. Thousands of British men lost.

She sat in the darkness with him, she alone knowing that the Germans would not yet be broken and the war would not be over by Christmas. Finally, she slid off the desk and held out her hand.

"May I have this dance, Captain Hunt?"

"Who do I look like? Vernon Bloody Castle?" he said in half-hearted protest, but she stood there with her hand out, and he rose to his feet, slipping his fingers into hers as the song played on.

_You made me love you, I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it_  
_You made me want you, and all the time you knew it, I guess you always knew it._

He curved an arm against her waist, and they stood there, not dancing really, but holding onto each other.

_You made me happy sometimes, you made me glad_  
_But there were times when you made me feel so bad_

She tilted her face back and looked up into his rough, handsome face.

_You made me cry for, I didn't want to tell you, I didn't want to tell you_  
_I want a love that's true, yes I do, indeed I do, you know I do_

"Gene…" she started, but that was all she could say. He had stopped her mouth with a kiss, and they stood there in each other's arms not moving as the record played out. A corner had been turned, the door re-opened. It didn't matter if it was 1917 or 1982 or 2008. This was what she wanted, and she drew in his dark, familiar scent and the feeling of his mouth against hers.

_Gimme gimme gimme gimme what I sigh for_  
_You know you got the brand of kisses that I'd die for_  
_You know you made me love you_

They weren't aware of it when the music died away and there was nothing but the scratching of the needle. They weren't aware that Shaz had come in the room.

"Miss?"

The kiss was broken, and they pulled away from each other.

"I'm sorry, miss. It's just…we have final rounds."

Shaz hurried off and left them there. Alex couldn't bring herself to go, and she stood there with the awful awareness that this could be the last time she might ever see him.

"Goodbye, Alex," he said.

"No, don't say that. Not goodbye. I can't lose you. Not now." She didn't care how ridiculous it might sound to be crying for a man she had just met. He only looked down at her with pain in his eyes. He brushed his fingers against hers, and then he was gone, barking orders to his men.

She dried her eyes and headed off.

She dreamed that night she was in a field of blood red poppies. An overwhelming sense of dread filled her, but something propelled her on. She came to the top of the hill, and when she did, there was a scarred battlefield littered with the bodies of young men. She stumbled down the hill, looking frantically, calling his name, until she found him, lying with lifeless eyes looking up to the sky. She sank to her knees with an agonising cry, and when she woke up, her face was wet with tears.

It was dawn, and she scrambled to the window. She could see the farmer's wagon twisting its way back to the village. Three figures sat in the back huddled against the light rainfall. She held her fingers up to the glass of the window as they disappeared into the distance.

**END CHAPTER THREE**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:**It seems to rain an awful lot in my stories. I do love rain, but this time it is based on fact: 1917 was the rainiest summer in Belgium in 30 years. It rained almost constantly, a fact which had dire consequences during the battle of Passchendaele. You see? Fanfic can be educational!

Many thanks to louella.

**CHAPTER FOUR**

It started on July 17th, just before daylight.

There was an explosion, shaking the house to its foundations. She awoke with a jolt, sitting upright in bed and fully awake. Shaz was sitting in the bed opposite hers with a look of wide-eyed terror.

Alex flew from the bed to the window of their attic room. There was another explosion. Close, too close. The first light of morning was just beginning to break over the horizon, and the sky flared with the burst of each shell in the distance.

It had begun. The offensive Gene had told her about. The big push that would not end the war by Christmas.

She turned back to Shaz's bed, but it was empty now. She had moved from the bed and was curled into the corner of the room with her hands cradled around her head. Alex went to her, and they huddled together in the corner as the world exploded around them.

"It's all right. They're going to be all right," she repeated again and again like a prayer.

She could feel Shaz shaking and sobbing against her, and they sat clinging that way to each other until the noise receded, moving away from them, focused now on some point in the distance.

They grabbed their dressing gowns from the wardrobe, and were still tying their belts around them when they hit the ground floor landing. Matron was already there, fully dressed, and the doctor was not far behind, dazed and blinking himself awake after his customary nightly descent into the bottle. They moved together into the ward, tending and reassuring the wounded.

When the men were settled, they ran through the house, securing doors, re-taping windows as dawn broke. Matron shouted orders to them, barely audible above the noise.

It was mid-morning when they were finally able to run upstairs and change into their uniforms. Later, after last rounds, Alex stood by the window in the ward. The house was still now, but the sounds of the war could still be heard in the distance. Shaz stood behind her as she peered through the curtains, both of them thinking of two very different men at the front.

They climbed the stairs to their room and fell onto their beds. Alex had thought sleep would be quick in coming, but an hour later, she was still awake, listening to the muffled sounds of Shaz crying softly in the bed opposite hers.

Finally, she rose and slid into bed next to her, wrapping her arms around her the way she had always done Molly after a nightmare.

"I'm so scared, miss."

"I know. I'm scared, too."

"What if something happens to him? What if he doesn't come back?"

"He will."

Shaz sniffed back tears. "When Chris was here last time," she started in a halting voice, "We…I _let him_. Well, I wanted him to."

Alex only stroked her hair rhythmically in sympathetic understanding.

"It wasn't my first time, me and Chris." The words spilled out of her like a confession in the darkness. "There was a boy from my street joined up right after the war started. He came round my mum's in his uniform to say goodbye the night he left. Everyone was saying what a lark it all was, but I couldn't keep from crying. He kissed me, and we…" She stopped, and there was a beat before she went on again. "He was dead by Christmas."

They lay quietly in the silence. Alex let her go on. "I told Chris he was my first. It felt like it to me, anyways. Do you think that's wrong? To lie like that?"

"You've got nothing to be ashamed of. Having had two lovers hardly makes you a scarlet woman. But no. I don't think it was wrong."

She could feel Shaz sigh with relief, but then her body tensed again. "My mum. She's Catholic. She'd die if she knew. She thinks it's an awful sin if you're not married."

"I think there are far worse sins in wartime," Alex said gently.

They listened to the distant sounds for a moment. "Have you…? I mean…I saw you and Captain Hunt that night."

"It's not like that," she said quickly. It was her automatic response when someone asked her about her relationship with Gene. It sounded strangely hollow now.

There was a brief silence in the dark room. "Why shouldn't it be?"

Shaz finally drifted off, and Alex left her sleeping there in her bed. She stood at the window looking out at the horizon. She remembered a documentary she had seen once in her old life. Respectable old grans in cardigans and pleated skirts talked with wistful frankness about their wartime lovers. Anonymous young men during air raids. Frightened soldiers about to ship out to Normandy. She understood it now. Fear, pain, all of it, so close to the surface. Young men, full of hope and promise, cut down. You had to cling to any moments of happiness you could find.

She thought of Gene, out there somewhere. She had imagined kissing Gene before. Imagined much more, in fact. It had always seemed – what had she told Gene about her conversation with Jackie Queen? – a _silly,_ _girly_ thing. The kind of thing you would do on student work experience. A harmless flirtation with your boss. But it wasn't silly now. Perhaps it never had been. She can't have been brought here, to find him in 1917, only to lose him so quickly, could she?

She finally fell asleep, and they awoke the next morning to the sounds of persistent shelling. It went on that way through the next days until the noise of battle became as much a part of the backdrop as the birds and the buzz of insects.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

They were on early rounds when it happened. The silence was eerie, and they looked expectantly out towards the horizon.

"What is it? What does that mean?"

"They'll be going over the top soon," Shaz said ominously.

"How will we know when it happens?"

Shaz looked toward the row of empty beds along the ward and then back to Alex. "We'll know."

The Matron had come in behind them then, and she watched the skies with them for a moment. "Make sure we have plenty of clean sheets and bandages," she said looking back and forth between them. "I daresay we'll need them."

They spent the next twenty-four hours boiling linens and strips of bandages, and Alex scrubbed the small operating theatre until her fingers were cracked and bleeding.

Summer had never quite settled on them, and the sky had begun to cloud over the next afternoon. She had taken an armload of sheets out to dry on the line when the clouds opened up. She frantically pulled at the sheets and turned to run back up the hill, trailing the wash through the fresh mud behind her. One end of a sheet tangled around her leg as she ran, sending her sprawling onto the ground.

The rain beat down on her as she picked herself up and dashed into the potting shed at the edge of the lawn. She stood just out of the rain, futilely trying to bundle the laundry onto her lap. It was ruined, of course. There were long streaks of mud running down them, and blood, she realised, from her skinned knees.

She collapsed on the little bench then, wiping the grit from the raw palms of her hands and knees as she cried exhausted and frightened tears.

"Sitting down on the job, eh? If I was your boss, I'd give you the sack."

He was standing there in the door of the shed. She looked up, too surprised to say anything for a moment. She jumped from the bench and threw her arms around him, holding him close. He made a startled noise but then responded by curling his arms around her waist.

"If I'd known I was gonna get this reception, I'd have stayed away longer."

She pushed away and looked up at him. "You're all right. Chris and Ray, they're all right?"

"Yeah, they're as all right as you can be knee-deep in filth and human waste," he snorted. "I've got to go to battalion headquarters. In St Vrain. Wouldn't say no to some company." She watched him there, leaning casually against the doorframe, his hands in his pockets, as if he were asking her to join him for a drink at Luigi's, but she could see in his eyes how important her answer was.

"I…can't. I've got patients."

"Patients? What patients? You've got a subaltern with ingrown toenails and a couple of lance corporals with a dose of the clap." He came further inside the shed. His face grew dark. "You'll have all the patients you can handle in a few days, Alex."

"Matron would never let me go."

"You let me have a word with the dragon lady. She can't be completely immune to my charms."

He grinned, and she forgot for a moment her skinned knees and ruined laundry.

They went back into the house to stand in front of Matron like schoolchildren in front of the headmistress. She looked back and forth between them with a disapproving glare, her lips pinched together colourlessly, but in the end, she had agreed on Captain Hunt's promise to be on his best behaviour.

After throwing some things into a bag and a quick goodbye to Shaz, they had started off, but not before Matron met her at the door and pressed into her hand the address of a women's rooming house in St Vrain with a nine o'clock curfew.

They left before she could change her mind, hurrying out the door and into the rain. They were able to hitch a ride on a farmer's wagon that was making the bone-jangling trip to St Vrain for market day, but at least the back was covered, and they were able to stay dry in the unrelenting rain.

Despite hitting every rut on the road to town, he fell asleep almost immediately, and it occurred to her with a pang that this was probably the most comfortable sleep he'd had in weeks. She left him to his few, fleeting moments of peace and looked out onto the rain-soaked countryside.

She knew what he needed from her tonight. What she was less sure of was what she was willing to give. She was coming to him with a year's worth of emotion. Not just desire, but fresh anger and hurt. Had she only let herself get swept up in the romance and uncertainty of the time?

And what was she to him? For all she knew, she was nothing more than some posh, obliging nurse with a pretty face and willing smile.

No. That wasn't true. Whatever force had sent her here hadn't brought them together for some random, anonymous coupling. They meant something to each other, whether in this time or another. She could think of a hundred reasons why she shouldn't be riding in the back of a farmer's wagon to some little Belgian town with Gene Hunt, but it was all overcome by the one reason she should: because she wanted and needed him. She knew, in spite of promises to Matron, she wouldn't be spending the night in the women's rooming house, and the thought of it made her shiver with a mix of anticipation and apprehension.

The wagon finally slowed to a halt, and the farmer dropped them in the centre of town, muttering something in some hybrid of French and Dutch. Gene slipped him a few coins as they jumped out of the wagon and into the rain.

St Vrain was a tidy market town that had been spared most of the damage of war. It was serving as battalion headquarters, at least until the frontline moved again, and the streets were filled with soldiers of the Empire.

"I've got bloody paperwork to sign and arses to kiss." He nodded across to a café across the street fro m the town square. "I'll meet you there in two hours."

Then he was gone, dashing across puddles in the street to a vacant building that had apparently been turned in battalion headquarters, leaving her standing there in the rain before she could speak.

She hurried down the street and into a bakery on the corner. There were only a few puny loaves on the shelves, but Alex bought a bun and a cup of dreadful coffee that tasted as if it were made of anything but coffee. After the rain let up, momentarily by the looks of the sky, she wandered through the market, filled as it was with withered fruit and vegetables. When it was time, she went to the café and sat at an outdoor table until Gene arrived.

She could see him coming down the street with his customary swagger. He had got a fresh shave and haircut, and he looked like nothing so much as Gene Hunt, _her _Gene Hunt, handsome and turned out for a fancy-dress party. But then he came closer, and she could see the faint stains of blood on his tunic, and she knew the reality of the situation.

They sat and talked over wine and a homely meal of chicken stew. He had been tense and distracted when he had arrived at the chateau that morning, even if he had attempted to hide it, but she could see the weight of the war gradually roll from his shoulders. By the end of the meal, they were both relaxed and warm with wine.

"So. This bloke." He swirled the last of his wine in his glass. "If I was to guess, I'd say it was all over even before he shot you."

She looked down. "Yes. I suppose it was."

"Who ended it? You or him?"

"Why? Is it important?"

"Not important. Just wonder who would be stupid enough to let you walk away."

"I don't know. It was him, I suppose." She rubbed at her temples with a pained sigh. This was the last thing she wanted to dredge up tonight. "It's complicated."

"What happened?"

She picked for a moment at the label on the wine bottle. "He asked me to tell him the truth about something important. So I did. And he didn't believe me." She waited for him to speak, but he only looked back at her, brows down, lower lip curled out. "He said some things. Some horrible things I don't know I can forgive."

"Well, that was your first mistake."

She blinked. "What was?"

"Telling him the truth." He emptied the last of his glass. "That's the problem with women. When men say we want you to tell us the truth about something, that's the last thing we want."

"How can men and women trust each other if we can't tell the truth?"

"What's trust got to do with telling the truth? Trust isn't about telling the truth, it's about telling us what we want to hear."

"This from a man whose wife left him for the milkman."

He looked away in hurt fished in his tunic pocket for his cigarettes. She regretted saying it. She reached out and touched his hand, trying to make amends.

"It occurs to me I don't know what you did before the war. No, wait. Let me guess. You were…a police officer."

He leaned back and draped his arm around the back of the chair with a smile. "Inspector."

"Told you I had a crystal ball."

"Me and Ray and Chris. Joined up as part of the Pals Battalion. There's not many of us left."

"Will you go back? After the war?"

"Probably be too busy pushing up daisies."

Stinging tears immediately pricked at her eyes. "Don't say that. Not even as a joke."

He took a long drag from his cigarette and flicked out the ash in the tray. "Do you know what the life expectancy for an officer in the trenches is, Alex? _Six weeks_. I've been on the line nearly three years. It's only a matter of time."

"_Don't say that!"_

"What if I do make it? What then? You really think there's any kind of future for you and me? Is that what your crystal ball tells you?" He stabbed the cigarette out. "You can get the idea out of that pretty little head of yours."

"What have we got, then?" she said, her voice a cracked whisper.

"We've got now, Alex," he said without sentiment. "That's more than some poor bastards got."

It was dark when they finally rose from the table. He picked up her bag and looked up and down the moonlit street. "Women's rooming house is that way," he said nodding toward the corner. His voice was low and questioning.

"Don't want to go to the women's rooming house," she said in a murmur.

She could see his face register. He swallowed hard. "You sure?"

She shivered against him in the cool air, and he slid an arm around her waist. "I'm sure."

They turned and headed in the opposite direction. She had hoped the wine would do something to ease her sense of dread, but it had been only partially successful. It had begun to drizzle again by the time they reached the officers' billet. She felt like a teenager tiptoeing up the stairs and sneaking into his room. She fell inside the room giggling and shushing him, but the laughter caught in her throat as he turned to face her and crossed to where she stood just inside the doorway.

They stood for a brief silence, close without touching. She ached for him in the clash of emotions, and then he kissed her, so hard she couldn't breathe, as if he were trying to tamp down the memory of anything else.

She moaned as he pulled at the buttons of her dress and his fingers found their way into her camisole and the soft skin beneath. His tunic came off, abandoned on the floor, and they both pulled at his uniform, desperate and breathless.

Boots were kicked away, puttees unravelled, trousers peeled off. He sat on the edge of the bed, and she stood between his knees. There was the sound of the ripping of her cotton stockings as he yanked them away from her garters and down her legs. He had her foot propped on his knee, and he kissed at her inner thigh as she worked on the maddening layers of undergarments. She popped the fastenings of her corset and pulled the camisole over her head and slipped her lacy underpants off.

She straddled him then, finding his mouth with hers, as he fell onto the bed and rolled her onto her back. His drawers came off in one motion until they lay naked against each other, bodies damp with sweat.

Fingers and mouths ran across skin, as if they were trying to etch every detail into memory. An unbidden thought flashed into her mind. _I'll never see him again, will I? _But she shut it out, pulling him down to her as she lay back on the narrow bed.

His mouth found the curve of her neck, down to the hollow of her throat and across to her nipples, hungrily pulling at them. In another time, she would have wanted to draw this out, to make every kiss and teasing touch last, but now she only wanted to feel his body pressed against hers, for him to glide over her until they reached that small moment of release when all the world would stop for an instant.

She dug her nails into his thighs impatiently. "Yes, Gene. Please. I need you." The raw need in her voice surprised her. She moved her fingers back up and took his face in her hands, holding his eyes for a moment. "I need you."

He entered her in one movement. She let out a raw noise and let her body curl into his, urging him on.

"God, Alex," he said in a ragged moan as he began to move above her. "Want you…" She lifted her hips to his to meet each thrust.

They moved together, in a moment that was at once raw and fragile. "Yes, I want you. I need you. God, yes," she said as they built toward a frantic climax. She wrapped her legs around his body, pulling him down, feeling her own heat spreading from her core as she exploded around him, and he emptied into her with an almost wounded howl.

He fell against her then, and he lay with his head against her breast as cradled his head and stroked his damp hair. She wanted to speak. To beg him not to go back to the front. To tell him all the things she had felt about him. But they both lay still and silent, not wanting to break the delicate spell.

He clung to her that way until he finally fell asleep, but she lay there awake, staring up at the ceiling. It was bittersweet, this brief moment with Gene. It had left her body tired and satisfied, but it couldn't fill the need or ease the fear. Still, she wouldn't regret it, and she still lay with her arms wrapped around him as she drifted asleep.

When she was awoke in the morning, he was standing with his back to her. He was doing up the last buttons on his tunic, and when he turned to face her, he was Captain Gene Hunt again. Her heart sank as she rose quickly and retrieved her things from where they had been abandoned on the floor the night before.

He paused to help her as she fastened her corset. He pulled at the laces at her back, his fingers lingering at her shoulders and resting at her narrow waist. So many hooks and fastenings, wrapping herself in layers. It felt like the buttoning up of emotions again, a return to the old life.

They rode back in silence. She sniffed back tears as her body almost throbbed with fear for him. He sat in the wagon across from her, eyes down. He would never let on how he felt. That was always his way, but his face was grim.

The wagon slowed to a halt in front of the chateau, and a feeling of foreboding suddenly churned in the pit of her. He muttered in broken French for the old farmer to wait for him. He jumped from the wagon and then helped her down.

"Goodbye, Alex."

"I won't. I won't say goodbye."

"You should forget me."

"No," she said in a sob. "I won't. Don't say it. We'll see each other again. We will."

He cocked his head back and looked down at her. "Now why do I get the feeling you know something I don't?"

He gave her a shallow smile and then leaned down to kiss her a last time. Finally, he unwound himself from her arms and jumped back onto the wagon. She watched him as it slowly lumbered back toward the village and became just a dot in the distance.

xxXXxx

The roof of their dugout had caved in from the weight of water, so they sat shivering in the mud on the floor of the trench. They were soaked through to the bone, but a no fire order had been issued. Not that it mattered. No fire would stay lit in the unrelenting rain. They were calf-deep in it now, and Gene looked down indifferently as a rat floated by.

They were silent, huddled together in a futile attempt to stay dry and warm. Up and down the line, men were writing last letters to sweethearts while other feverishly rubbed at rosary beads. The waiting was the worst part.

Another shit-and-piss filled trench to climb out of, another No Man's Land to be crossed. They all blended together after awhile. But he was one of Kitchener's Mob, and he'd bloody well do his duty, even if he was no longer sure what they were meant to be fighting for.

He pulled his watch carefully from his breast pocket and looked quickly up at Chris, who was stabbing with disinterest at his tin of cold beans and sausages. He looked back down with relief. Chris hadn't seen him. It was better that way.

"How much time, boss?"

"Five minutes," Gene said gently and tucked the watch back into his pocket. Chris blinked and swallowed hard. "Eat your beans, son."

Chris shook his head and dropped his fork into the tin. "I can't."

"Give it here," said Ray, dropping the end of his cigarette into the mud.

"That's right. They want a gas attack, we'll show 'em a gas attack, eh?"

Chris managed a nervous smile as he passed the beans to Ray, who devoured the rest of the tin.

"We've got them on the run, eh, boss?" Chris said in unconvincing eagerness. "They won't know what's coming, will they?"

"Of course they know we're bloody coming," Ray sneered. "We've been shelling them for two weeks. They're just waiting for us. _Twonk_."

"Shut your gob, Ray."

"Sir…" Chris began after a moment. "If I don't make it…"

"And what makes you think the Hun would waste a bullet on the likes of you, Corporal Skelton?"

"If I don't make it," he repeated, "will you tell my girl I loved her?"

"Don't you get soft on me, Christopher. You can bloody well tell herself."

"Tell her…tell her she was the last thing I was thinking about before I went. _Please_, sir."

Chris' chin had begun to quiver, and his eyes were damp. It mattered. Gene nodded. "I'll tell her, son."

Chris' shoulders dropped in relief. He looked away and wiped his eyes when he thought the others weren't looking.

Gene pulled out his pocket watch again. It was time. There was a momentary rumble of fear in his gut, but he tamped it down and rose to his feet with a nod. The others rose, fixing bayonets. It was silent except for the muffled sounds of tears and someone's voice whispering the 23rd Psalm.

He nodded again at Ray, who picked up the whistle from around his neck and placed it between his lips.

_Alex_. He tried to chase her from his mind. It was dangerous. Thoughts of women and home and the future. Things like that got you killed. But she stubbornly lingered at the front of his memory. The feel of her. Her mouth on his, her body beneath him . The strange familiarity of her he couldn't shake. His fingers snapped the watch shut again, and he wondered if she would be the last thing he would think before he went.

The sound of the whistle pierced the air.

"Over the top, lads! Over the top!" he bellowed.

Voices screamed on in a mixture of bravado and terror. They hoisted themselves up the ladders and charged across No Man's Land toward the unseen enemy.

**END CHAPTER FOUR**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **Thanks, louella! And thanks to all of you for reading and reviewing. I know it's been heavy and will continue to be heavy, but please know that I don't do sad endings.

xxXXxx

**CHAPTER FIVE**

She was pulled out of a shallow sleep, her heart already pounding.

There were voices somewhere in the house. Male. Not English.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dim. Shaz was already awake, throwing the covers back.

There were the heavy sounds of boots on the stairs, and then Matron's voice, strong and clear among them. "No! You cannot!"

They jumped from bed and began pulling their dresses over their heads when the door onto their room flung open. A soldier was standing there with a rifle slung over his shoulder. She didn't recognise the uniform, and there was an airless moment before anyone moved. Then he gestured at them and waved his hand.

"_Vite! Vite!"_

Alex exhaled in relief. _French_.

"What's happening?" she said, in a thin voice, but the young soldier only shrugged and gestured towards the stairs.

They followed him down to the ground floor, where Matron stood arguing with an officer.

"But it is not possible!" she said, waving her hands in front of her.

The French officer in charge only shook his head wearily. "There is no choice, madame."

Two soldiers came from the direction of the ward carrying one of their patients on a stretcher. "What do you think you are doing? Put him down at once!" She turned back to the officer. "These men simply cannot be moved! They will never survive the journey!"

Matron had been utterly unflappable since Alex had arrived here, but her face was tight and drawn and her voice was rattled. "What's happening?" Alex asked her.

"The French want to evacuate us," Matron said grimly, looking back and forth between Alex and Shaz. "The Germans are retreating, and they're headed this way."

The officer went on in rushed French. Alex listened, summoning up her schoolgirl French, but only getting every other word in her dazed, rising panic.

They would be taken to the nearest train station and from there they would go on to a hospital just across the border in France. Out of harm's way and the advancing Germans.

"But…we're a Red Cross hospital. We'll be all right, won't we?" Shaz asked hopefully.

Matron didn't answer. They had all heard about German atrocities in Belgium and their treatment of civilians. Of women. "You two girls should go. You'll be safe. The doctor and I can stay here."

"We can't leave without you," Shaz said, but the older woman shook her head, her lips pressed together resolutely.

"These men cannot be moved, nor can they stay here alone. I'll take my chances with the Germans."

She moved off without another word, snapping orders in broken French to the soldiers with the stretcher for them to return the patient to his bed at once.

The minutes that followed were a blur. They only had seconds to dress and pack, and she stood in her room jamming things into a small valise as a young soldier hovered over them in the doorway.

"_Allons-y! Vite!"_ he snapped at them impatiently as he led them, almost at gunpoint, to the waiting ambulance. Matron was there, shoulders back, her hands folded formally in front of her.

They turned to her and she offered a firm handshake to both of them. "Goodbye, Nurse Granger. Good luck. Goodbye, Nurse Drake." Alex slipped her hand into the older woman's grip. "You've become a capable nurse."

Capable. It was high praise indeed, and she drew her arm around the surprised woman's shoulder in a spontaneous embrace before they were hoisted into the back of the ambulance. Several soldiers climbed in after them, slamming the doors shut behind them. She could hear the voice of the officer calling out to the driver, and they lurched forward.

The soldier sitting across from them pulled a pack of cigarettes from his tunic pocket and wordlessly held them out to her. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, but he had the defeated, hollow-eyed expression of a man thirty years older. She gave him a thin smile and shook her head.

_Gene_. How would he find her now? He was out there somewhere in unimaginable conditions. He was alive. She couldn't think of him any other way.

"They'll be all right, miss. Chris and Captain Hunt. You'll see," Shaz said with a smile as if reading her thoughts.

"Of course they will." Alex tried to smile back.

It had only been days since he'd returned to the front, but it felt much longer. Despite what he had said about forgetting him, she didn't regret what had happened between them in St Vrain. Here in wartime with all of the real and imagined barriers between them gone, being with Gene had seemed right and natural. _Inevitable_.

But now thoughts of him, of their night in St Vrain never strayed far from the front of her mind. She thought of him at night as she lay in bed trying to remember the feel of his body. During the day she would turn expectantly and fearfully toward the door each time she would hear an ambulance approach.

No. She couldn't think about it. He was all right. She'd find him.

It was still hours until sunrise. They had all sunk down into the silence of uncertainty. Shaz fell asleep, from pure exhaustion most likely, and after awhile her head lolled against Alex's shoulder.

Alex closed her eyes and tried to sleep as they rode on in darkness.

xxXXxx

She had almost fallen asleep when she was jerked back into awareness by the lurching of the ambulance.

She blinked herself fully awake to an empty ambulance. She could hear voices outside, arguing and cursing in French. It had begun to rain again, she could see as she climbed from the back of the ambulance into ankle-deep mud. Shaz was already there, looking on hopelessly. One of the men had draped his tunic around her small frame, and she was swallowed up in it, shivering in the stinging rain.

Two of the younger soldiers had their shoulders to the back of the ambulance while the officer signaled at the driver. There was the awful grinding of gears and the sound of the wheels spinning furiously and futilely in the mire. The soldiers finally stood back and raised their hands helplessly. They were stuck.

"I am sorry," the officer said to her. "It is no use."

"But there must be something you can do. You can't just give up!"

The officer only gave her a Gallic shrug.

Shaz stepped forward. "Can't you…can't you call for someone? Send some help?"

"We must return to our battalion, madame." He turned towards his men, speaking in French, and they began to gather their things. The driver got out of the ambulance and closed the door with a hard slam.

"But you can't leave us here!"

The officer nodded over Alex's shoulder. "There is a farmhouse. There are some _Canadiens_. Doctors. You will be safe."

She turned to see a farmhouse in the distance, a few hundred yards off the muddy, rutted road. A Red Cross symbol had been hastily painted on a bedsheet and hung from the upper window. She hurried after the driver as he slung his rifle over his shoulder and whistled for his men to follow.

"You'll tell someone we're here, won't you? They'll come for us."

He merely lifted his shoulders. "You will be dry and warm. You should be grateful, madame."

The men marched off in the rain, collars pulled up to their ears. Shaz and Alex looked at each other and trudged through the mud toward the house in silent resignation.

xxXXxx

They trudged on through the blinding rain. His eyes were flooded with sweat and mud. He drew his hand across his eyes to wipe them dry, but it only made it worse. His ears rang from the force of the constant explosions to one side or the other, but they trudged on, senseless.

He had lost all track of time. The sky overhead was black with clouds and smoke and the hail of bullets. It could have been midnight or noon.

They had been crawling through this for a week since they'd gone over the top and had only moved a few meaningless feet. The battlefield stretched on, strewn with spent shells and fallen men. Bloated bodies, half submerged in mud, tangled grotesquely in barbed wire. Ahead of them, he could just hear the voice of some young lieutenant. A twenty-year old just out of Charterhouse. "Keep moving! Don't stop, men!" But then there was another explosion, and the voice was silenced.

Chris was beside him; Ray, a few steps behind. They moved forward. Toward what, he had stopped asking. Another explosion, only feet away. The concussive force of it sent him reeling backward onto the ground, and he lay splayed out there for a moment from the shock.

He could just hear Chris call out to him through the noise, and blinking and coughing, he tried to pull himself back to his feet. His rifle had been knocked from his hand in the fall. He could see it sinking into a flooded trench, and he tried to reach for it. Nothing moved. He frowned and looked down to see his arm hanging uselessly at his side.

"Fucking hell!" he yelled through clenched teeth. A shell fragment had torn through his right shoulder, and the blinding pain of it suddenly flooded into his consciousness.

"Boss!" he could hear Chris yell in a panic.

Gene looked up, and Chris was sloshing his way through the mud, one hand outstretched toward him. With an agonizing cry, Gene managed to pull himself to his knees, cradling his wounded arm against his chest.

"Boss, are you – "

And then somehow Gene could hear it, a single bullet cutting through the deafening roar. Like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly severed, Chris crumpled to the ground in a heap, his legs twisted underneath him.

"_CHRIS!" _It roared from his chest, and with his remaining strength he inched forward to where Chris lay toppled on the ground. He pulled Chris' head onto his lap. The light flickered in his eyes like a dying flame. "_Chris_! Chris, can you hear me?"

There was no response, only a low moan of pain. Gene leaned his head back and bellowed for a medic as shells burst around them.

xxXXxx

She had lost track of time. Had it been one day or two?

The abandoned farmhouse had been turned into a casualty clearing station just behind the front line, staffed by a few Canadian doctors and nurses. In another time, it had been just big enough for two or three generations of a Belgian farming family, but now every room was crammed with men in various states of consciousness. Those who were beyond help were simply shot full of morphine and left to die while the overworked, exhausted staff tried to save the men who could be saved. They hadn't slept in days. They weren't likely to anytime soon.

There had been another push, and wounded men came in waves. As soon as they had patched or buried one wave, another would come. Filthy, terrified, hopeless. They waited for some word, and each time a fresh batch of men would come through, she and Shaz would ask. _The 3__rd__ Manchesters? Is there any word?_

"That lot have been pinned down for days. Poor blighters." It was always the response, and then, after awhile, the men would only shake their heads grimly.

Alex had already become numb to it. She was oblivious to the fear and the stench and the near-constant bombardment. She summoned up what little knowledge she had gained in the past few months and threw herself into it, trying to be of some use.

There was the sound of another ambulance approaching, and the shouts of the medics outside. More of them. When would it end? She braced herself for the onslaught.

The door of the farmhouse opened up, and daylight flooded in. Two corpsmen carried in a stretcher, and the doctor looked up from a patient wearily.

"This one's not too bad," one of them said, and the doctor only nodded for him to be set down in the corner to wait his turn. It could be hours.

"Where are my men? Where are they?"

The voice. Alex was pulled from her exhausted stupor and looked up from the patient she had just finished shooting with morphine.

"Gene? Is that you? Gene!" She stumbled on with tears in her eyes to where the man on the stretcher was fighting to sit up, and the medics were trying to pin him back down.

"Alex!" he called out to her. He had his right arm in a makeshift sling, and she could see as she came to his side that a hole had been ripped open in his shoulder, caked with mud and blood.

"Are you all right? What happened?"

"I'm fine." He waved her off. "Where's Chris? He should be here."

_Oh, God. No. Chris._ Alex turned to see Shaz looking back at them with frightened eyes.

"Chris? What's happened? Is he all right? Tell me he's all right."

She staggered forward, reaching out, and Alex caught her in her arms.

"Don't know…he was shot. "

"But he's all right. He's all right, isn't he?" Tears had begun to well in Shaz's eyes. Her voice was thin and broken. "_Please_."

"I'm sure he's fine." Alex patted her numbly on the back. "He's probably still at the field dressing station. No need to worry."

She looked over at Gene. The corners of his mouth were turned down, and he shook his head once.

A sense of dread rose up in the pit of her. Alex turned and walked to the corner of the room where a silent row of stretchers lay along the wall, sheets pulled over still bodies. She pulled the sheets back one by one until she came to it. The familiar, unseeing eyes looked up at her, and she gently reached up and ran her fingers down his face to close them.

She stepped aside, barely able to see Shaz and Gene through her own curtain of tears. Shaz let out a heart-piercing wail and stumbled to the stretcher, to where she folded herself across Chris' body.

They watched helplessly as she sobbed. Gene rose from the stretcher and stood next to Alex. Shaz stood after a moment, wiping her wet face with the heel of her palm. She turned to them. "We can…we can do something, can't we?"

Alex swallowed hard before she spoke. "I'm sorry."

"But…we can fix him! It's not too late! It's not! It's not too late!"

She looked at them imploringly, reaching out blindly for help. Gene took a step in toward her, and Alex could see him wince with pain as Shaz flung herself against him. But he let her, and she cried into his tunic.

"He's gone, love. He's gone," he said softly.

She sobbed, long and hard. A respectful hush fell over the room for a moment, heads bowed. And then things moved on. There was a rush of nurses and patients. Orders shouted. The plinking of metal against metal as bullet and shell fragments were removed and dropped one by one into enameled bowls.

They stood there, a small island of grief amid the awful business of war.

xxXXxx

One of the doctors finally gave Shaz a sedative, and Alex led her off to her bed upstairs, where she was still sleeping.

When she came down, one of the doctors was stitching Gene's shoulder as he stared off blankly into the distance. A pang of grief stabbed at her, and then she crossed to him.

"I'm so sorry, Gene," she choked.

He lifted his good shoulder. "People die, Alex," he said without looking at her.

She chewed at the corner of her lip to keep herself from crying. It was awful, watching him this way when pain radiated off him.

The doctor stood back and began to scribble on his clipboard.

"Your friend's pretty lucky, Nurse Drake," he said. "He's got – what do the Tommies call it? A 'Blighty one.'"

Alex shut her eyes and said silent prayer of relief. A 'Blighty one.' It meant he was out of the war.

Gene blinked in incomprehension. "Eh?"

"You're going home, Gene."

"No…you can't…" he said numbly.

"You'll recover fine, Captain Hunt," the doctor said matter-of-factly, "But you won't be able to carry a rifle again. Not with that shoulder injury."

The doctor smiled blandly and signed the paperwork with a flourish. He was gone then, on to the next man. Alex squeezed Gene's hand, but the news seemed not to register.

"Did you hear that?" she asked through tears. "You're going home."

She put her arms around him and kissed his rough cheek, but his body was rigid.

She heard her name being called; one of the doctors needed her, and she hurried off, leaving Gene sitting there with his eyes focused on some point in the middle distance.

There was one patient to be seen, then another, and every time she turned to check on Gene and Shaz, she was pulled away. There was finally a lull, and she headed upstairs to check on Shaz. Mercifully, she was still asleep, curled into a tight ball on her tiny bed.

When she went back down to the patients, it was dark. Gene had been told to rest, but he was gone, and she headed out into the night.

He was in the barn when she found him. It was empty now, all the animals having been long since slaughtered for food. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the narrow shaft of moonlight streaming in, and she could just make him out, slumped into a pile of hay with a half-empty bottle of wine clutched against him. He seemed not to see her at first, and she stood there in the door of the barn, aching for him, not knowing what to say or how to help him. She grieved, too. She couldn't imagine the pain of this Gene, who had fought side by side with Chris and then held him as he died in terror and agony.

Finally, he looked up, and she waited for him to speak. His voice was thick with pain and drink.

"I told him. I told him. I said, 'Don't go getting yourself killed, you great pillock.' Never listened to me. Poor miserable bastard."

She went inside and knelt next to him. "It's so bloody unfair."

"There's where you went wrong. Thinking war had anything to do with fairness. Some of us poor bastards live and some of us die. Nothing fair about it." There was pain creeping in at the edges of his voice, and then it was gone. "That's the way it works, Alex. Chris got himself killed and nothing can change it. No use crying about it."

She blinked back stinging tears. "But…he was so young. He had his whole life ahead of him. How can you…"

"When your number's up, it's up," he interrupted sharply. "Corporal Christopher Skelton wasn't the first soldier died in my lap. Bloody well won't be the last."

"It's all right to mourn, Gene."

"Mourning's not gonna bring him back, is it, sweetheart? What bloody good does mourning do?"

There was a long, heavy silence. He rose and took a few unsteady steps forward, standing by the door of the barn and looking out into the night. She could almost see him, sinking further down into the black. His voice was quiet when he spoke.

"Before we went over the top, he asked me to tell Nurse Granger that he was thinking about her when he died. 'Tell my girl her name was on my dying breath.'" There was a mirthless snort, and he raised the bottle to his lips again. "They all say that. 'If I don't make it, tell me mam I was thinking of her. Tell her I was thinking of home.' _Bollocks._"

He drank again in the empty space that followed. "He was lying on the filthy ground, crying and shitting himself, and I crawled to him and held his head in my lap and tried to stuff his guts back in him. He knew. He looked up at me, and I could see it in his eyes. He knew. And you know what was on his dying breath? You know what the last thing he said was? 'It hurts, boss. I don't want to die.' So, I told him what I always tell 'em. 'You're gonna be fine, son. Just fine.'"

She brushed the tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. "Such a waste…"

He turned to her, the anger and hurt beginning to rise to the surface. "Is that what you think? All of this is just a waste of time?"

"No," she lifted her shoulders helplessly, "Of course not. That's not what I…"

"Chris died thinking he could put the world to rights again. That means something to us. You say he died for nothing, you're pissing on all of us."

His voice cracked, and even in the dim, she could see his eyes were damp. She had only seen that once before, the night he learned of Chris' betrayal, and she could only imagine Gene's pain now at the loss of him. She rose and crossed to him. "I'm sorry. That's not what I meant."

But he went on, only half hearing her now, wrapped in his own grief.

"He died because his King and his Country asked him to. That means something, Alex. It _bloody means something_!" His voice was beginning to fray, he leaned his head back and with a howl of pain and rage, he threw the empty bottle into the air. She watched as it arced against the darkened sky and then landed with a shatter somewhere in the distance.

He lost his balance, toppling forward, and she reached out for him. He steadied himself before he fell, but he had strained his wounded shoulder with the force of the throw.

His good hand flew up to his wound, and he let out a grunt of pain through his teeth. "_Fuck! Fucking shitting hell!_"

He stood bent at the waist for a moment until he could breathe again. Then he righted himself and took an aimless, staggering step out into the night.

"_He didn't even want to bloody come here!"_ It roared out of him. "He _pissed_ himself when Britain declared war 'cause he knew Ray'd make him sign up. Couldn't even find Belgium on the bloody map!"

She moved in closer as he stood almost throbbing with pain.

"Now I've got to write his mam and tell that girl in there that he died a hero's death fighting for England when really he died terrified lying in his own blood and filth not even sure who we were meant to be fighting." He turned and walked a few paces away. "It shouldn't have been like this. Shouldn't have happened to him. He's lying dead in there while I'm swanning about with a fucking hole in my shoulder off home to Manchester."

She crossed and reached out to him, placing a hesitant hand on his shoulder, and she could feel him shaking under her touch. She half expected him to pull away, but he didn't.

"It shouldn't have happened to him. Christ, he was just a lad. He had something to live for. What've I got 'cept the fucking milkman sleeping on my side of the bed? I swore to his mam the day we shipped out I'd take care of him, and I let him get himself killed. It should've been me!"

He said it not with self-pity, but with the guilt of a man who had seen too many young men die before him.

"This wasn't your fault, Gene."

"_I could've done something_! I could've…I could've made him stay home! I could've protected him!" he raged.

"You know that isn't true. Chris was a grown man. You couldn't have saved him any more than you could have saved any of your men. I don't know why things happen the way they do. God knows I wish I did." She reached out and touched his face. "I don't know why Chris died. Maybe it was part of some plan. Maybe it was for no bloody reason at all. But I know – " Her voice broke, and she bit at her lip for a moment. She looked up at him, her fingers still stroking his face. "I know I'm glad it wasn't you. You've got something to live for. You have."

She reached up and kissed softly on the corner of his mouth. Her arms wrapped around his waist, and after a moment, she could feel his body uncoil in her arms.

He made a choking noise of defeat, and she knew she could not hold back her own tears. She buried himself against him, and he wrapped one arm around her. She could feel him clutching at a handful of fabric at the back of her dress, but she didn't know if he cried. Perhaps this would be the only grief that he would allow himself to show her, but they held onto each other in the darkness that way for long time as she cried enough tears for them both. For Chris and for Shaz and for all of them.

**END CHAPTER FIVE**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **So sorry for the delay! Life and work have intervened, and I just don't have the time to write that I used to. I originally intended this to be an epic multi-chaptered fic like "TVD," but I just don't think it's going to happen, and I thought it would be better to wrap it up and give the thing some sense of closure rather than leave it hanging. So, I've had to re-think the ending quite a bit in order to wrap it up sooner rather than later. One or two more chapters at most, and I'll try to wrap it up quickly.

I hope you still enjoy it, and I apologise if it's not up to snuff. Thanks to louella for her always-wise comments and advice. If it sucks, it's my fault, not hers!

xxXXxx

**CHAPTER SIX**

He dropped into a moody silence, and after some time, she left him by himself in the night air and went back inside to wait for him. When he didn't come, she curled up on the hay on the floor of the empty barn and found herself drifting off alone.

She dreamed of him that night. She had dreamed of him many nights since coming to this time and place, but it had always been anxious dreams of wandering charred and pitted fields looking for him.

This was different.

They were in his office. His face was turned away from hers in shame. Her hand still stung from where she had slapped him, and his awful words still rang in her ears.

And then the walls of CID melted away, and they were in the churchyard again. She was standing outside her own body, watching as the puff of smoke curled from the barrel of his gun, and she fell onto the cobblestones as if in slow motion. That look on her face. Disbelief and betrayal.

She woke up with a cry, her heart racing, and she could almost feel the sharpness of the pain in her side from where his bullet had pierced her.

She sat huffing in fear as her eyes adjusted to the light. He had come to her at some time in the night, and he was wrapped around her now. She pulled herself away from him and sat some distance away with her knees to her chest, watching him in his sleep.

He would most likely be going back to England today. She had hoped for this moment, the promise of Gene's safety, since she woke up here, and now that it had arrived, she wasn't sure how she was meant to feel.

She thought she had reconciled these two men. That she could separate DCI Gene Hunt and all that had happened between them from this man. Now, sitting here as the sun rose, she wasn't certain she could do that. He was her constant, but he had hurt her unimaginably. Could she willingly open herself open to that again?

But then his eyes began to twitch feverishly under his lids. He cried out once, an unintelligible noise of pain, and he was not a Thatcher-era London copper, but a battle-scarred soldier lost in grief and guilt.

She had hurt him, too, the DCI that she'd left behind. She knew that now. In her own way, she was _his_ constant as much as he was hers. He was adrift, and in some misguided belief that he needed to hear the truth, she had pulled away the only lifeline that he had. How could she do that to this man, too?

He awoke then, prying one eye open at a time as he awkwardly pulled himself up to sitting with his good arm.

"Good morning," she said as he rubbed at his wounded shoulder. "How's the arm?"

"Hurts like a bastard."

"We're low on morphine, but I'll see what I can do."

"Save it for the men who need it."

She smiled. So tough and impervious, but she could see the emotional and physical pain grooved like lines into his face. He stretched his legs out in front of him and tried to wrap his puttees round his calves. She watched for a moment as he struggled with one free arm.

"Here, let me."

"I've got it."

"Just let me help."

"I'm not a bloody cripple," he muttered half-heartedly.

"You were shot in the shoulder, Gene. I think that qualifies as being cripple. At least temporarily. Let me help you."

He swore under his breath, but then handed her the cloths. She knelt beside him and slowly wrapped the puttees round his legs.

"We'll be…" She stopped for a moment. "We'll be burying Chris today. A priest comes up from the village every afternoon. Last rites. Burials. " She stretched her mouth into a humourless smile. "We always manage to find something for him to do."

She rose, brushing the hay from her skirt, and there was a moment of silence before he spoke.

"I reckon they'll be sending me home soon."

"I imagine so." She looked away for moment. She could feel him watching her expectantly. "What'll you do?"

"Won't go back to Manchester. Nothing for me there now." He lifted his good shoulder in a light shrug. "London maybe. Scotland Yard, if they'll have me."

"They'd be foolish to turn you down." She gave him a watery smile.

He pulled himself to his feet and took a few aimless steps. He stood for a moment rubbing at the back of his neck, and she waited for him to speak.

"You're from London," he said, and took another step in towards her. "Big city like that. I could use a friendly face."

She wanted to throw her arms around him and weep into his chest. She had hurt the other Gene, and she couldn't do that to this man. How could she promise him that she'd go with him when she had no idea if or when she could be yanked into some other time?

She wanted to speak, but when she opened her mouth, nothing followed. His face dropped. There was a moment of pain, and then he puffed out his chest and gave her an indifferent shrug.

"That is, if you have time. You'll probably be off at the hunt ball or the Royal Opera."

"Gene. I…" she started in a soft, pained voice, "I don't know if I…"

"Nurse Drake!" It was the voice of one of the doctors, calling to her from the house.

She looked back at Gene. "Gene, we need to…"

"Go on, then. Duty calls."

"We'll talk about this later. All right?"

"Right. Talk."

She reached out and kissed him quickly before heading back to the house. She turned back to the barn as she reached the back door of the house. She could see him through the open doors of the barn, and she gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile before going in.

The doctor muttered something and thrust some bandages and a bowl into her arms before heading off to tend to his patients. More burns and wounds to debride. The sight of a paper cut had made her squeamish just a few months before, and now she had become numb to it. She set off to work, her head still spinning from her conversation with Gene.

When she was finished her morning work, she headed up into the loft to check on Shaz. She half expected to see her still curled up into a ball on her bed, but she was buttoning up her uniform dress as Alex climbed up the loft steps. She looked up at Alex with red, watery eyes but said nothing and then went back to her buttoning.

"We've cleared yesterday's wounded," Alex said quietly. "You don't have to do this today."

"It's all right," Shaz said without looking up.

"I think everyone will understand."

She continued with her buttons. "I've got a job to do, miss. The world doesn't stop turning because Chris died." She froze then with her fingers poised at her collar. Spontaneous tears burst into her eyes. She covered her face with her hands and began to sob as Alex folded her into her arms.

She could offer her no words of comfort. How Chris had died a quick and noble death. How she would learn to love again.

Her tears were finished as quickly as they had begun. She pushed herself away from Alex and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. Smoothed her apron, straightened her cap.

"I'm ready," she said in a whisper. Alex squeezed her hand, and they went downstairs to see all but a few of the previous day's wounded into waiting ambulances. The old priest from the village was there, moving through the rows of bodies muttering Last Rites, making the sign of the cross with his gnarled hands.

When it was done, they knew there would be a lull until the next wave of wounded men came through. The priest shuffled over to them and gave them a benign, sad smile. Alex took Shaz's hand. "It's time," she said. Shaz nodded and her eyes pooled again.

They went out into the sunlight. There was the first glimpse of blue sky in what seemed liked weeks. Gene was waiting for them in the new tunic he hand managed to scrounge from somewhere. He offered Shaz the crook of his arm, and they walked on toward the small cemetery behind the barn, a sad little funeral procession.

Chris' grave had been dug, and two soldiers leaned against spades as they approached. Chris' body was at their feet, wrapped in a simple shroud.

The priest began, a stream of Latin from his battered prayer book, holy water sprinkled onto the grave.

"_Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis,,," _

Shaz stood with her chin up, her eyes to the sky as if to keep the tears from flowing down her face. Alex looked over at Gene, who stood at attention. She knew he was swallowed up by grief and guilt and his own pain. She ached for them both.

And then it was done. Shaz dropped a handful of earth into the grave and then slowly brushed her hands clean. The priest drifted away. The soldiers ground out their fags and started the business of filling in Chris' grave.

Gene turned to Shaz. He took his hat off and held it in front of him, looking down for a moment before speaking.

"Chris…he wanted me to tell you…that he loved you." He paused, and tears popped into Shaz's eyes. "I was with him. When he died. He was thinking of you. It was quick. Peaceful."

Shaz blinked back her tears and gave him a sad smile. "We both know better than that." She reached up and kissed Gene softly on the cheek. "But thank you, Captain."

Gene only nodded, unable to speak, and he pulled his hat back down over his eyes. Shaz turned and stood by the little white cross that had been hastily stuck into the ground.

Alex squeezed Gene's hand. "It's all right. I'm going to stay with Nurse Granger for a bit."

Gene nodded, and Alex drifted over to where Shaz stood. Alex waited for her to speak.

"Last time we were together, we had a row. He was always wanting to talk about after the war. Where we'd live. How many kids we'd have. I couldn't bear it. I think…I think I knew somehow. Finally…I just couldn't listen anymore. I told him to shut up. I didn't want to talk about it. We barely spoke for the rest of the time he was at the chateau. He was still cross with me when he left." There was a beat, and Shaz let out a sad, heavy sigh. "That's the last time I saw him."

Alex slipped a comforting arm around her shoulder.

"I was late after that. I was sick with worry. What would I do with a baby? I'd get the sack. My mum would chuck me out on my ear."

"You should have told me. I could have helped."

Shaz looked up at her with round, frightened eyes. "I didn't know what you'd think of me."

Alex smiled. She'd been three months pregnant with Molly when she and Pete had married.

Shaz went on. "I actually prayed that I wasn't pregnant. Or if I was that I'd lose it. I'm so ashamed now. Now, I wish I was. I wish I was going to have a baby. At least then, I'd have something of Chris."

There were no tears in Shaz's voice, only sadness and resignation. She suddenly turned and looked up at Alex, speaking with a sudden urgency in her voice.

"Do you love him? Captain Hunt."

"Yes. I do." It was the first time she had said it out loud, and the thought of it was both overwhelming and terrifying. "Very much."

"He's got a Blighty one hasn't he? He's going home."

"Yes."

"You should go with him, miss."

"But…I don't know if I can."

"Why not?"

"Well, I…" She wasn't sure the rest of the world even existed. She knew how absurd all of this sounded. "I'm not sure how much longer I'll be here. In this world."

"I don't think any of us can be sure of that, miss." Shaz smiled sadly, and then turned back to the house.

Alex stood for a moment. It had begun to cloud over again, and the damp air was bracing.

She had no idea how or why she was here or what would happen if she went with Gene back to England. Had Layton's bullet opened up some portal in her damaged brain that allowed her a glimpse inside other worlds? And what would happen if she left this one? Would the whole thing cease to exist and fall in on itself like a black hole? Or would Capt. Hunt wake up alone one morning next to an empty space in the bed that they had shared the night before? Could she do that to him? Vanish without a trace?

There was another possibility. Perhaps the world existed with her in it – another _her_ – and it would continue on after Alex left it.

Alex stood there at the grave for a moment, and then walked briskly back into the barn. Gene was stuffing the last of his things into his kit bag, and he pulled the drawstring shut with a sharp yank.

"How's the girl?" he asked.

"She'll be all right. In time. She's a strong one."

He stood up, the bag at his feet. His face was dark and serious.

"Doctor signed my Blighty papers." She only nodded, knowing what that meant. "I'm leaving tonight. Train to Calais and then a transport ship back to England."

She swallowed against the hard knot that had formed in her throat, and she could feel the tears pricking at the back of her eyes. "I know."

"I want you to come with me, Alex."

"I want to, Gene. I do," she started slowly, her voice heavy with emotion. "But I don't know if I'm going back to London."

He squinted at her. This wasn't the answer he wanted. "Oh? Gonna go marry some Viscount and live in the country, then, eh? Shoot partridges and ride to the hounds and all," he said with traces of bitterness creeping into his voice. "Maybe it's not over with you and that bloke."

"How can you say that? Do you think I would have gone with you to St Vrain if I wanted anyone else but you?"

"I don't know what I'm meant to think, Your Majesty." She flinched. He'd always meant his teasing nickname for her affectionately, but now he said it with venom. "Maybe you're one of those women I've heard about. You join up with the Red Cross and convince some poor Tommy you can't live without him. You cry and you weep and you moan. You take him to bed. Then when it turns out he's not going to die after all, you don't want to know. On to the next miserable sod."

"That's not true." She could barely speak now.

"Probably just as well. It would never work out with us," he snorted. His words stung. "Your family'd cut you off without the shilling. "

"It's got nothing to do with money!"

"Your friends pretending like they didn't know you when you pass them on the street."

"Stop! That's not it!"

"Every year another mouth to feed on a copper's salary."

"It might not look like it to you, Gene, but I know what it's like to do without."

"Oh, right. Times are rough. Having to do with one lady's maid instead of two."

"_Stop it!_ Will you _stop?!_" The force of her voice stopped him, and he looked back at her with a frown. She took a deep breath and went on. "You stubborn man and your ridiculous pride! You're lashing out, trying to hurt me because you think I hurt _you!_"

"You didn't hurt me, sweetheart. You couldn't if you tried."

"Oh for God's sake, Gene! I love you!" She reached out and took his face in her hands. "There are things you don't understand. And I won't even try to explain them because you'd never believe me anyway. But I love you." She could feel herself begin to well up. "And if there's a way for us to be together, then I will find it. Please believe that. Please. Trust me."

He frowned. "_Trust._"

"Yes. You said once. In St Vrain. You said we had _now_. We still do. As long as that lasts." She kissed his mouth and his face, but his body was rigid. "Please, Gene. I love you. I love you…" she murmured, her lips against his mouth and his ear. "I love you…"

Then he melted into her, cradling the back of her head with his hand and pulling her closer. They sank onto the floor, and she lowered him onto his back in the clean, sweet-smelling hay.

She straddled him, one knee on either side of his hips, working at his belt buckle and positioning herself over him.

"Alex…" he said, but she stopped him with a kiss.

"It's all right…it's all right…"

His eyes closed, and he made a small noise that was the release of pain and grief as she began to move gently above him. They made love there, as much out of need and comfort as desire. Afterwards, she kissed his damp cheeks and curled herself against him.

Shaz was right. Life was fleeting and fragile. None of them could be sure how much time they had.

But she was sure of something else now. She wouldn't leave him. Not now.

"I reckon I should get packing if we're going to make that train to Calais," she said after a long while.

There was a silence, but then she could hear it in his voice, the heaviness of weariness and relief and emotion. "I reckon you should."

They drifted off there together. She had no idea how long they slept. It couldn't have been more than twenty minutes, but she was disoriented when she awoke to the sounds from the front of the house.

Gene was already awake, browns drawn down in concern, winding himself from her arms.

"Gene, what is it? What's wrong?" she asked, wiping at her eyes.

"_Sssh!"_

She strained to hear. There was the screech of brakes and tyres, the heavy sounds of boots against gravel. The never-ending onslaught of wounded in ambulances, she thought. It was all too familiar.

Then there was something else, something unfamiliar, and she looked up at Gene in dawning fear.

The unmistakable sound of German voices.

**END CHAPTER SIX**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **All right, so I lied, and this won't be the last chapter. At least one more after this, but we're nearing an end. I promise to wrap it up before S3 starts. Thank you all so much for R&Ring. I'm sorry for the long delay in posting chapters, and I'm so grateful for all of you who have followed along. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Thanks as always to louella.

xxXXxx

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

"Oh my God…" she said in an exhaled whisper, but then she felt Gene clamping his hand over her mouth and pulling her back down onto the ground.

She could hear the voices, growing louder and more insistent, mixed then with frantic English voices.

They wedged themselves into the corner of the barn and peered through the slats of the walls. There was a soldier coming towards the barn. He couldn't have been more than seventeen, and he swam in his too-big uniform. Carrying the rifle in front of him, he looked like nothing more than a boy playing at soldier.

The boy raised his gun up in the direction of the barn door and called out something in German. His voice was thin and high, and he bounced from foot to foot. He was nervous, and Alex knew that this could suddenly all go very wrong.

"Go!" Gene said to her in a low, harsh whisper.

"No, I can't leave you…"

"I'll be all right," he interrupted. "Just go!"

Gene scrambled to his feet and hurried as fast as his injured arm would take him up the ladder into the loft of the barn. Her heart thumped as she quickly scanned the barn, and her eyes fell to where a small Red Cross crate had been wedged into a corner.

She hurried over and pulled the lid off. It was a box of bandages that had got soaked in the rain and then put in a forgotten corner of the barn. The boy solider outside called out again. She hurriedly dropped the lid back onto the box and hoisted it up onto her hip.

She came out of the barn with her free hand raised in surrender. "It's all right…" she said calmly. "It's all right. Just bandages."

He barked at her in German again and waved his gun at the box. She lifted the lid slowly and tipped the box toward him. "See? Bandages. That's all. Just bandages."

He poked at the cloths with the tip of his rifle and then made a satisfied grunt with a wave of the rifle toward the house. "You go," he said, and she breathed an inward sigh of relief.

But then he cocked his head and peered over her shoulder into the open door of the barn. He raised his gun and took a halting step closer.

"You can look if you'd like," she said casually. "But there's nothing in there." She knew that he couldn't understand a thing she said, but she hoped the evenness of her voice would be enough to calm him. He hesitated, licked his lips, but then shrugged and pointed the barrel of the rifle back to the house.

"_Schnell!"_ he said. She gave him a taut smile, and she could almost feel the heat of his rifle against his back as they made their way back to the house.

The air was thick with tension when she entered. Shaz and the two Canadian nurses were huddled in a corner with their arms wrapped around each other in fear. A soldier had a rifle trained on them.

There was a young German officer standing in the center of the room barking orders at the other soldiers, who were pulling the few wounded men that remained out of their beds.

"What are you doing?" one of the Canadian doctors yelled. "They're wounded! You'll kill them!"

The officer raised his pistol toward the doctor's head and shouted something in frantic German. His face was purple with rage, and Alex knew that these were not ruthless, efficient German troops. They were retreating soldiers who had got cut off from their unit and had stumbled onto the farmhouse. They were lost, frightened, and desperate.

The officer waved the gun in the direction of the doorway, and Alex was aware that two soldiers were standing there supporting a third man, his teeth gritted in pain. The leg of his trousers was soaked with blood, and Alex could see a shard of white bone poking through his flesh.

"You!" The German officer pointed at the doctor. "My brother. He is wounded. You will help him."

On the floor, one of the wounded soldiers was moaning in pain now. The doctor knelt down next to him to check his pulse, but the German officer roared and pulled him back to his feet.

"My brother!" he yelled.

"I will set your brother's leg, but this man…" He pointed down at the wounded British soldier. "This man is haemorrhaging."

"My _brother_!"

"Your brother will live," the doctor said evenly but firmly. "This man will die unless we help him _now_. I need to—"

The doctor fell onto the ground then, cut off mid-sentence, and it all happened so quickly, that it took a moment for Alex to realise that the German officer was standing with his arm outstretched, his pistol curled into his hand.

She looked down to where the young doctor was lying lifeless on the ground, a halo of blood pooling around his head. There was an airless moment of stunned disbelief, and then one of the Canadian nurses began to weep.

"You and you!" The German pointed his gun at Alex and the surviving doctor. "My brother! His leg. You will help him." Alex felt her mouth go dry with fear as the doctor motioned the officer's wounded brother onto an examining table.

The doctor muttered tense instructions to her in the thick air as they set his compound fracture. Infection was almost inevitable under these conditions, but he would live. For now. The Tommy who had been pulled from his bed was already dead.

The wounded German was only semi-conscious, but he screamed out wordlessly in pain as the doctor snapped his broken bone into place. His brother raised his gun to the doctor's head and stream of rageful German came forth.

Alex had been in the presence of more than one desperate, frightened gunman, but her heart thudded in fear until the man's moaning subsided and the officer finally lowered his gun.

He stood there watching them work, though, his pistol gripped in his hand. Behind them, his men set to work, rifling through supplies, stealing bandages and morphine while Shaz and the nurses returned the surviving wounded men to their beds

After it was done, the Germans soldiers stumbled into the kitchen while the shattered staff tended to patients and rebandaged wounds. There wasn't much left in the cupboards. A few tins of fruit, some hard cheese and bread. But soon they had pulled everything out and onto the table. They tore into the food as if they hadn't eaten in days.

She was frightened, but she knew to keep her wits about her. She watched Shaz's hands shake as she wrapped a fresh bandage around one of her patient's wounded arms.

Alex crossed to her and took the bandage. "Here. Let me," she said gently. She expected Shaz to protest, but she only nodded and stepped aside to let Alex finish.

"Captain Hunt? Is he still here?" Shaz whispered hoarsely.

There was a beat. She wouldn't implicate Shaz. "No. He left before the Germans got here."

"Thank God." Shaz smiled a thin smile of relief, but then her face darkened. "What will they do to us?"

"I don't know."

"Only…I've heard what the Germans do to civilians. Babies and children. I heard they went into a convent and took all the nuns. Stripped them and made them…" She bit her lip and looked away. "If they'd do that to nuns, what would they do to us?"

Alex slipped her arm around Shaz's shoulder. "We'll be all right. That's just…propaganda. Stories." But she was far from sure of that.

She watched them in the kitchen, hacking into a wheel of cheese with abandon. They had broken into the small stash of wine and were talking to each other now in loud, aggressive voices.

"Everything's going to be all right," she said again, more to convince herself than Shaz. Outside, it had begun to drizzle again, a grey, cold rain.

_Gene…_she thought of him, shivering out in the loft of the barn. He was wounded, and as much as he tried to deny it to her and to himself, he needed her help. She crossed into the kitchen and picked up an empty plate from the table where the officer and two of the others sat. She could feel their eyes on her, and one of them said something in German in a low, leering voice. The other two laughed. An involuntary shudder passed through her, but she gave them a bland smile and turned away.

They had left a wedge of cheese and a heel of bread. She quickly tucked the remains into the pocket of her apron and slipped out the back door. The young soldier was there, sitting on an overturned barrel with his rifle across his lap, shivering miserably in the drizzle.

"Are you hungry?" she asked, putting her fingers to her lips to mime eating. "There's food. Bread. _Brot und kase."_

Climbing off the barrel, he let out a faint smile and headed into the house.

She scrambled into the barn and hoisted herself up the ladder. "It's me," she said in low voice, and she could see him deflate with relief as she came up over the top into the loft.

"Alex! You all right?"

She hurried over and knelt next to him in the hay. "Yes, I'm fine. They've shot one of the doctors and let a wounded soldier die, though."

"_Christ_. How many are there?"

"Eight. One of them's badly wounded. Compound fracture. What do we do?"

"Nothing. They wandered into enemy territory. Half a platoon of Allied soldiers could show up any moment. They'll be on their way soon enough."

"What if they find you first?"

"They won't."

"But what if…"

"They'll shoot me, Alex," he said quickly, a bitter smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.

Her eyes widened. "We've got to get you out of here. We can get you to the village. You'll be safe," she said in a rush.

"Walk to the village? With my gammy arm? I can barely stand up straight. " He shook his head slowly. "They'll fill their bellies and be gone before morning with whatever they can pilfer. I'll take my chances here."

She realized then that he was cradling his wounded arm against his chest. He was in pain, and she could see the blood seeping through the bandage.

"You're hurt...."

"No. I'm all right."

"You've pulled some sutures out." She reached up and tried to pull back his tunic.

"I'm _all right_, Alex." He said, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her hand away. "You can't worry about me."

"At least let me get you some morphine. If they haven't made off with it all." He said nothing for a moment. "You're hurt, Gene. Let me help you."

"I won't be responsible for you getting yourself shot."

"They won't." She looked back at him, and his face was dark. "But surely…surely they wouldn't shoot a woman, would they? A nurse?"

"Edith Cavell, Alex," he said sharply. "_Edith Cavell_."

She blinked at the mention of the name, somehow familiar, and then it came to her. She had had her appendix removed when she was twelve, and she'd stayed in the Edith Cavell Children's Wing of the local hospital. Evan had told her the story of the brave English nurse who had helped Allied soldiers escape the Germans in WWI and had been executed for it.

She swallowed hard. "I can be here and back before they even know I've gone."

"I won't be able to stop you, will I?"

"No."

His grip on her wrist loosened, and he nodded once. He reached up and cupped the back of her head, pulling her in for a kiss. "Don't let those Boche bastards see you."

She blinked back tears. "I won't."

She could see the look of pain and concern on his face as she scrambled back down the ladder. She could quickly cross the distance between the barn and the house and then be back again. It would be all right. The Germans would be drowsy with drink and food, and she could slip out with the morphine. Then they would be gone by morning, and she and Gene could leave for England.

There was almost a bounce in her step as she opened the barn door, but then she made a noise of surprise as she saw the German officer standing in the doorway of the house, looking up at the barn with a look of intent on his face.

She smoothed her apron, took a breath and worked on a look of nonchalance as she crossed to the door. He threw his arm up against the doorframe, blocking her way as she reached him. He waited for a moment before speaking.

"What were you doing out in the barn?"

Her heart in her throat, she spoke evenly. "I went to get some more bandages."

"Where are they, then? Your bandages."

"We're out."

He bit at his lip and looked over her shoulder with narrowed eyes, then he turned his gaze back to her, looking her up and down once before moving his arm and letting her pass.

He was suspicious. If she went back out now, she risked discovery. But Gene needed morphine and a fresh bandage for his wound. There was a supply of morphine surettes they had missed when they were ransacking the place earlier. Clean bandages, too. She could take them and slip out to the barn before anyone noticed.

The German officer had returned to the table, and two of his men were seated at there with him in the kitchen looking over a map they had spread out. They were arguing about something, stabbing their fingers at lines along the map, trying to find their way back to the rest of their unit. It meant they'd be going soon, at least.

She casually crossed the room to a small kit that was jammed into the back of one of the drawers. It had a roll of bandages and a handful of morphine surettes and syringes. She scooped them into her hand and tucked it into the pocket of her apron, silently closing the drawer shut again.

The Germans were still arguing when she reached the back door, her fist balled up in her pocket. They didn't notice as she reached out for the latch and pulled it open. They would never miss her.

"Where are you going?"

She felt as if her heart skipped a beat. She turned slowly. The German officer had risen from the table. She tried to give him a smile.

"Outside. For some air," she said with a casual shrug.

He frowned and took a step in towards her. "What is that in your hand?"

She pulled her hand from her pocket and showed him her empty palm. "Nothing."

He crossed to her in two long strides and pushed her against the door with one hand. She cried out in surprise and pain as the door latch dug into the small of her back. With the other hand, he reached into her pocket, and her heart fell as he drew out a handful of morphine surettes.

"What is this? What are you doing with these?"

"It's morphine, bandages," she said evenly. "I'm a nurse. Why wouldn't I have them?"

"_Where were you taking these_?!"

"I told you. I was going out for some air."

He waited a moment, looking at her through narrowed eyes as if her were making a decision about something. Then, without taking his eyes from her, he called out something in German, and the men rose from the table, rifles slung over their shoulders, and pushed past her.

She could feel her legs weaken as they crossed the distance into the barn. The German spun her around and pushed her outside. She stumbled on to the ground, mud splattering on her dress, but he pulled her back to her feet with a guttural noise and pinned her arms behind her back.

He was yelling at her, at his men, a stream of unintelligible, angry German. She shut her eyes against the tears and clung to the tiny hope that Gene had somehow made an escape before the soldiers found him.

Shaz and the others had stumbled out behind the Germans. "What is it? What's happening?" she could hear Shaz say in a thin, frightened voice. Alex opened her eyes to see the dawning realization on Shaz's face. Captain Hunt had not escaped safely. He would be found in the barn, and he and Alex would most likely be shot.

The barn doors flew open and figures emerged. One of the soldiers had Gene by the arm, and he flung him onto his knees on the ground. His teeth were gritted in pain. His lip had been split, and blood pooled in his eyes from a fresh cut on his forehead. She ached for him.

"Alex…" he said before the soldier hit him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his rifle, and he collapsed onto the ground.

"_Gene!"_ she managed to choke out before the German officer's hand flew up and struck her across the cheek. She felt her knees finally give way, and she collapsed onto the sodden ground.

END CHAPTER SEVEN


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: **Well, here's the final chapter. Thanks to all who have read and reviewed. I know I have lost some of you along the way, so I appreciate those who have stayed with it despite the long delays between chapters. I think this is probably it for me as far as writing, which will be either be met by relief, disappointment or overwhelming indifference! :) Regardless, I have appreciated your kind words over the past couple of years, and I hope you have enjoyed this last story. It didn't end up quite where I had thought it would, but I hope this last chapter will be a satisfying end to it.

Thanks as always to louella.

xxXXxx

**CHAPTER 8**

"Don't fucking touch her!" he bellowed as he tried to pull himself back to his knees. One of the soldiers brought the butt of his rifle back down against Gene's face, and he collapsed, unmoving, into the mud.

"_No!_" Alex cried out, still on the ground, and she stretched her fingers out toward his. The officer yanked her back to her feet, taking her face hard in his hand. He was yelling at her in an unintelligible blend of German and English, inches away from her face, but she kept her eyes on Gene who still lay motionless on the ground.

_Oh, God, no…_

Then he made a small noise of pain, and she shut her eyes in momentary relief.

The German officer shouted something to his men, and one of them grabbed Gene by his arm and dragged him back toward the barn. She could feel her arms being pinned behind her back, and the officer pushed her forward.

"_Please don't do it!"_Alex heard Shaz cry out, but then one of the soldiers herded her and the others back inside the farmhouse at gunpoint.

The officer jabbed at Alex in the back with his pistol, and the taste of fear rose at the back of her throat as she stumbled blindly on in panic. They were pushed into the barn, where Gene was dumped into a corner. Alex was made to follow, and two soldiers pulled the doors shut and retreated to the opposite corner of the barn.

"Oh, God! Gene!" She ran to him and knelt beside him in the hay, pulling his head onto her lap. "What have they done to you?"

He was dazed but conscious and struggled to pull himself up. "No, don't move." She yanked off her apron and blotted at the blood on his face to assess his wounds. The German's rifle had sliced open a fresh cut on his cheek, and his right eye was quickly swelling shut. "The cut on your lip isn't bad…"

"Alex…" he said weakly and reached up for her hand.

She dabbed at the cut over his eye and went on. "But this one is deep. You'll need sutures."

"_Alex…_" he said again, firmer, and he gently pulled her hand away from his face. He spoke with heavy sadness. "It doesn't matter now."

Her stomach lurched as the sudden, fearful realisation churned at her core. She turned and looked out the slats of the barn to where the officer and one of his men were talking heatedly. So, this was it. They would be taken and stood against the side of the barn and shot.

"That's what they're doing out there. Isn't it?"

He gave her a humourless snort. "They're trying to decide whether to shoot us now or try us first and _then_ shoot us," he said bitterly.

Her eyes snapped over to where their two guards were only half-watching in the other corner, huddled together against the unseasonable chill. They had their rifles across their laps, and one soldier wearily lit a cigarette and passed it to the other. They wanted no more of this. They were lost and cold and exhausted and wanted nothing more than to be at home with their mothers and sweethearts.

She felt the warmth of a faint glimmer of hope. "We can escape," she hissed in a low whisper. "There's a back door to the barn…"

"We _can't_."

"Come on, Gene. Those two are hardly paying attention. If we can just make it to the village…"

He shook his head. "My _ankle_. It's bloody useless. Can't put any weight on it."

"Is it broken?"

"I heard it snap when they pulled me out of the loft. _Fucking hell_."

She reached down and tried to unlace his boot, but he let out a grunt of pain. The ankle had already swollen so badly she couldn't pull the boot off.

"I can help you! You could…lean on me," she said with a thin desperation to her voice. "We could…we could…" She stammered on, searching in vain for some way out of what seemed like an inevitable fate.

"Even if we were both able-bodied, we wouldn't get more than fifty feet before they shot us in the backs. You know that. I've spent the last three years of my life trying to keep myself alive. If the Germans are going to get me now, I want it to be standing on my own two feet and looking 'em in the eye. Not shitting and pissing myself in the mud like an animal."

He looked away from her, and she sank back onto her heels. He was right. It was absurd, futile. She blinked her eyes to keep hot tears of frustration at bay. "No. This can't be happening. This can't be how it ends. Not like this. Not now." She turned to him, knowing he could never understand all she had been through.

"I should never have got you into this, Alex."

"You didn't get me into anything I didn't do willingly." She reached up and stroked at his face with the back of her hand and let the tears flow freely down her own cheeks. "I have loved you, Gene Hunt."

He reached over with his good arm and pulled her against him, and she let herself cry as she listened to the sound of his heartbeat.

Then there was a noise, somewhere in the distance. She could feel his body grow rigid. She looked up, and his head was cocked, chin lifted toward the roof of the barn as he strained to hear.

"What is it?"

"Aeroplane…"

"British?"

"No. French, I think. _Nieuport_."

She sat up and listened with him as it grew closer and then seemed to hover overhead in a tight circle for a moment.

"What's it doing?"

"Right about now, it's wondering what the bloody hell a German armoured car is doing parked in front of a Red Cross hospital behind Allied lines."

"So…what does that mean?" she asked, her heart beginning to drum in hope.

He shook his head from side to side with uncertainty. "There's got to be an airfield nearby. If the pilot can get back home…"

"Then we're safe," she interrupted. "They'll send someone. They have to." She looked across the barn to where the two guards were sitting. They had stiffened and were looking up toward the roof of the barn with looks of concern. She turned back to Gene. "The Germans…they have to know the Allies are nearby. What happens now?"

"They'll leave if they have any sense."

"So…we're safe. They won't shoot us now, will they?"

"That's not what I said, Alex." His voice was ominous. "They're scared and lost. Not thinking right. There's no telling what they'll do."

"But there's a chance we'll be all right. There's a chance."

"A chance about the size of a grasshopper's knob. But there's a chance."

She brushed away a tear and managed a smile. "I'll take it."

The plane made a last circle overhead and then flew off. They waited, ears tipped to the sky, until the sound of the plane's engine was just a distant hum.

They sat in the awful silence, eyes lifted up expectantly. There was nothing to do now but wait.

She wondered if she died here now, would her consciousness flicker out all across time? Would Molly and Shaz and Evan mourn for her in three different decades? And what if her death here in 1917 somehow propelled her all the way back to 2008? What then? Would Gene Hunt find the thought of living without her as unbearable as the thought of it was to her?

The door to the barn swung open, and the German officer stood there. There was a small, airless moment, where she expected him to summon his soldiers for a hasty retreat, but then she saw the pistol gripped tightly in his hand, and her blood ran cold.

"Get up," he said to them.

"Oh, God…" She couldn't move. Her legs were useless, and she sat with her back pressed against the wall of the barn to keep from falling over. "Please, no…"

"Let her go. She's a civilian. She had nothing to do with this."

The German officer ignored Gene and signaled for the guards. They crossed the barn to pull Gene and Alex to their feet, and Gene yelled out through gritted teeth as he landed on his shattered ankle.

They were pushed out into the dying light. Shaz and the rest of the staff had been forced back outdoors to witness what was to follow, and they all looked on in a blend of shock and terror. Shaz was crying, standing with a handkerchief pressed against her lips.

They were brought around to the side of the barn, where their backs were pressed against the wall. A soldier came towards her. He had something in his hands. It was a bandage, she could see, one they had no doubt stolen from the hospital, and she realised that this was meant to be her blindfold.

"Nononononono…" she said in a broken voice. She turned to Gene as the soldier reached his arms up to her face. "Gene!"

"I'm here, Alex! I'm right beside you! I'm here!"

Then there was darkness, and she could only make out their black, shapeless forms. There was the fearful thudding of her heart, and the thick smell of carbolic soap from the bandage that filled her mouth and nose with every ragged breath she took.

"_Gene!_"

"I'm here!" he called back to her. She felt him reach out for her then, skimming the cuff of her dress and then finding her hand. He laced his fingers with hers. This would have to be enough, this last touch of his fingers against hers.

She inhaled deeply through her nose to steady herself. She was aware of noise. Footsteps, the click of rifles being loaded. The sound of Shaz weeping mournfully. Oh, God, this was happening. She squeezed his hand tighter, and she could hear his defiant voice cut through the air.

"Shoot straight, you bastards!"

Then another noise. In the distance. The churning of an engine. An aeroplane. The _Nieuport_ was coming back.

No. Not an aeroplane. Something else. She was aware that Gene's grip had tightened in hers. There were German voices, speaking in a rush. The sound of the engine grew closer.

"Gene, what's happening?" she said into the darkness.

But then there was the sharp crack of a gunshot. She drew in her breath and held it there. It was Gene. They had shot him. She was sure of it, and she waited for the sound of his lifeless body slumping to the ground.

_God, help me_…She tightened every muscle in her body. It would be over soon.

Then another shot. And another. The Germans were yelling; there were the sounds of uneven footsteps over the ground in a hail of bullets. She felt a hand on her face, pulling her blindfold away. It was Gene, standing with his own blindfold drawn down around his neck. Behind him, she could see a British armoured car growing ever closer. Several soldiers were walking next to it, crouched down with their rifles at shoulder lever. They were firing on the outnumbered Germans, who were scrambling to take cover.

"Go!" he barked at her and pushed her toward the farmhouse.

"Not without you!"

"I'll be all right!" he yelled. "_Go!_"

She wrapped her arm around his waist, and she tried to support his weight, but she could barely move more than a few inches in the mud.

She caught sight of the Canadian doctor crouched in the doorway of the farmhouse. "Help him!" she called desperately over the noise. The doctor frowned, but then he darted out of the house, dodging bullets as he went. He took Gene from her, and the two moved across the ground. She tried to follow, but her lace-up nurse's shoes weren't made for trudging through the mud, and she had become hopelessly mired up to her ankles after only a few steps.

One of the German soldiers ran past her then, trying to reach the cover of the barn. A bullet hit him in the back of the head, sending a sickening spray across the front of her. She stood frozen in fear for a moment before she realised that the ground between her and the house was now littered with the bodies of dead or dying German soldiers. The British troops were fast approaching, firing on the soldiers that remained.

"Alex!" Gene stood leaning against the doorway for support, waving her on. "Get down!"

She made a dash across the ground. "I'm coming!" she yelled. She was almost there. Safe in his waiting arms. She smiled, reached out her hand for him.

Then his face changed. His eyes widened in fear. She froze.

_Why can't I move?_ Her legs seemed to have stopped working, and she was suddenly aware of a searing pain in her side. She lifted her hand to see the crimson droplets on her fingertips.

"ALEX!"

She could feel herself falling to the ground as if in slow motion, dimly aware of his voice calling out to her, the sounds of the battle. Then there was the feeling of his cold hand against her face. There was no pain now. Only a feeling of drifting away.

"Alex! Can you hear me?!" He reached out for her hand, but she could barely feel him now. "Alex! Stay with me."

"Gene…" she murmured.

His voice seemed so far away to her now. Like a train whistle, comforting but distant, and then it was gone.

"_Alex!_ Can you hear me?"

Her eyes fluttered open, and she could see his face above hers, his forehead creased.

"Can you hear me, Alex?"

She tried to open her mouth to speak, but all that came was a dry, raspy sound.

"Call the doctor!" Gene said to someone over his shoulder, and she was aware of movement somewhere nearby.

"Gene…" she finally heard herself say. With the effort she could manage, she lifted her hand and rested it against his cheek. She could feel tears of relief prick at her eyes. "We're alive...we made it…"

He looked impatiently over his shoulder, and then turned back to her, taking her hand in his and drawing it gently away from his cheek. "It's all right. Don't talk."

She let out a small, choking cry. "We didn't die, Gene. We're alive."

"Don't talk now. You're in hospital, Alex. You're all right."

_Hospital_.

It hit her all at once, flooding back to her. The antiseptic smell, the sharp pain in her side again. _Gene_. His tie slung low around his collarbone, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows.

"Oh, God…" She struggled to sit upright and gripped her fingers around his shoulders. "It's 1982, isn't it? _Isn't it?_"

"Alex…" She could feel his hands at her waist, trying to ease her back onto the bed.

"You're all right. Tell me Chris is all right. _Tell me!_"

"_Chris? _Yeah, yeah, he's fine. You need to rest, Alex."

"Something _happened_, Gene."

"You had an infection. Doctor says you'll be all right now."

"No, that's not it…it was real, Gene. It happened…you and me." She had started to pull blindly at the tubes and wires in her arms.

"Don't, Alex!" He tried to press her arms to her side. "_Where's the fucking doctor?"_

Someone appeared from the corridor and crossed to her bedside, fiddling frantically with the wires.

"Something happened, Gene…"

"Don't talk, love."

"Something real." He seemed to be receding into a fog, and her own voice had a faraway sound to it. "About us…"

And then she was gone again.

When she awoke, it was night. She took a breath before looking around her. Still 1982. She could see Gene in the corridor outside her room. The surgeon was there with him, hands on hips. Gene was listening with his arms across his chest, head down, nodding slowly.

She watched them for a moment, and then the doctor gave a small smile of comfort and clapped Gene on the upper arm in that doctorly way before striding off.

Gene ran a hand down his unshaven face, and then he turned and looked inside her room to see her open eyes. There was the faintest flicker of a smile, and he took a tentative step inside her room.

"If it isn't Sleeping Beauty." He was teasing, the way he always did, but there was the sound of relief in his voice, rough from lack of sleep. There were dark circles under his eyes, too, but he looked impossibly handsome to her.

She put her weight on the palms of her hands and tried to sit up. There was twinge of pain in her side. "How long have I been out?"

"Since last night." He slipped his hands in his pockets and chanced another step or two inside. "Almost lost you, Bolls. But the surgeon says you're gonna be all right now. Says you can go home tomorrow."

"Good. I think I've had enough of hospitals."

He came over to the side of her bed and lowered himself down onto the edge. He rubbed at the back of his neck. "What you said before, Bolls. When you woke up earlier. You said something _happened_. Something to do with us."

"I…had a dream," she said with hesitation, knowing he would never understand the truth. "About you and me."

"You and me? Sounds like a ruddy nightmare," he said half-heartedly, but then his face grew serious, and he was quiet for a moment. "So this dream. How'd it end?"

She smiled softly. "I'm not sure yet."

They locked eyes for a moment. She felt a bittersweet pang. She had known the feel of his mouth on hers, the weight of his body against her own. It was all she could do not to throw her arms around him. Cover his face with kisses and weep with relief into his chest. But he wasn't the same man she had known in 1917. How could he ever know what they had been through? He knew nothing of the harrowing battles, the fear and pain. Nothing of the night they had spent in St. Vrain.

He jumped to his feet, shifting his weight and fiddling with the keys in his pocket. "Well. Right. I should let you get your rest. Shaz'll be here tomorrow to help you home. Make sure you settle in all right."

Nothing had changed in this world. Not really. All the things that had been said between them couldn't be unsaid. Somehow, it didn't matter. She wasn't sure she could separate DCI Gene Hunt from the Capt. Hunt she had loved in another time. She wasn't sure she wanted to. They weren't the same man, but perhaps they were the same in all the ways that really mattered.

"I don't want Shaz to take me home."

He turned to her, one eyebrow raised. "Eh?"

"I want _you_."

xxXXxx

He eased her out of the Quattro and helped her up the stairs to her flat, muttering soft words of encouragement. The keys jangled in the lock, and he pushed the door open. She took a step inside, and he followed.

He went on softly, almost nervously, telling her there was fresh milk in the refrigerator, reminding her to take her pills. He put the kettle on for her while she changed into pyjamas, and he handed her a mug of tea as she padded back into the room.

"Thank you, Gene. For everything."

He nodded, and let his hands fall with a slap against his thighs. "Right. Well. I reckon that's everything. I'll just bugger off and let you rest. I'll be downstairs at Luigi's for a bit if you need…"

"_Stay._"

He considered it for a moment and then turned to her, nodding once.

She took a long breath in before going on. "There are things that happened between us," she began with uncertainty. She wasn't altogether sure she knew what to say next. "Before I was shot."

"_Christ,_ Alex," he said with weary regret. "We don't have to talk about it."

"No, we _do_. We could just forget it. Go on like nothing ever happened. But it will always be there, Gene."

"It was an _accident_. For fuck's sake," he said, more angry at himself than at her. "You can't really think I would have shot you on purpose."

"I know. I know it was an accident. That's not what I meant." She looked at him meaningfully across the distance between them.

"What, y'mean _Jenette?_ Some bit of Irish skirt? I'm a _bloke_, Alex_._ I'm not made of granite. And what the bloody hell did you care who I got my kit off for?"

"No, you're right. It wasn't any of my business," she said quietly. "But I thought…"

"You thought what?"

She smiled a wistful half-smile. "I thought we were the ones." He looked away in shame at the sound of his own words being said back to him.

After a moment, he spoke. "I was…adrift. Everywhere I turned, I was getting stabbed in the bloody back. Everyone I trusted. Mac, Chris. You. " And then, softer: "She didn't mean anything to me, Alex."

Alex nodded and gave a wry smile. "I know. I know she didn't. I don't know if that makes it better or worse."

He lifted his shoulders. "I'm only trying to be honest."

There was a momentary silence. She paused before she went on, knowing the next words would be the hardest. "What you said. About my daughter…"

"Look, I was a shitarse, Alex. I don't know why I said it. It was the booze…"

"No, you were trying to hurt me," she said quickly. "Because you thought I'd hurt _you_."

He looked away, not denying it. "I heard those tapes, Alex. The things you said about me. It would've taken one word from you to set things to right again, and instead, you told me you were from the bloody future," he said with quiet hurt.

"I know…I know. I wish to God now I'd never said anything. It wasn't fair." She took a step closer into him. "You don't have to believe it. That's not important. What you need to believe, if we're to have any chance, is that I wasn't trying to hurt you and that I told you what I did for a reason." She crossed to him, took his face into her hands, and she could feel him shiver once under her fingertips. "You need to trust that, Gene."

"_Trust._"

"Yes. I trust you. I do. But we need to trust each other." She thought of her conversation in an outdoor café with a British army captain. "Maybe the truth really isn't that important."

She smiled, but then turned away from him, her arms folded across herself for comfort. She crossed to the sofa and sat there in the corner, tucked into a ball. There was a long moment before she spoke.

"My daughter. Her name was Molly." _Molly_. It hurt to even say her name now. "The reason I don't see her or talk about her is because…" She stopped, chewed at her lip for a moment. She took a long breath to keep from crying. "She's gone, Gene. I lost her. Last year."

"Just before you came to CID," he said, as if her transfer request made sense to him now.

She nodded. It was a lie, but one with the painful veneer of truth. She knew with an unexplainable certainty that she would never see Molly again.

"Why didn't you tell me? You could've told me." She could hear the ache in his voice.

"I don't know." She shrugged helplessly. "I didn't want to admit it to myself let alone you. I thought…I thought if I tried hard enough, I could make it not true. I could get to her somehow."

He watched her for a moment with understanding in his eyes, and then she covered her face with her hands. "I miss her. I miss her so much."

She began to cry then, long sobs that she had never allowed herself. She could feel him next to her, pulling her against him. They sat that way for a long while until her tears finally subsided. He lifted her face to his.

"You're gonna be all right, Bolly." His voice was as sweet and liquid as honey.

Her eyelids began to sag. "I'm so tired, Gene…"

She felt him scoop her into his arms, and they moved across the floor into her bedroom. He sat her down on the edge of the bed and smoothed her hair away from her face, kissing her on the forehead, and then after a beat, once, softly, on the mouth.

She rested her head against his shoulder, but then she could feel him move away.

"Don't go."

After a silent moment, he rose from the bed and unbuttoned his shirt, pulled his tie over his head. She slipped under the covers and moved to the other side of the bed. There was the sound of his boots dropping to the floor, and then he slid in next to her.

"C'mere."

She nestled herself against his broad chest and drifted into a fractured sleep, images and sounds whirring through her mind.

Capt. Hunt and Nurse Drake. What had happened to them when she had left that world? Had the whole thing been snuffed out like a candle flame? Or had Capt. Hunt gone on to live a long life mourning the nurse he had loved and lost at Passchendaele?

There was another possibility. Perhaps a part of Alex's consciousness had been left behind when she was whisked away, and Nurse Drake had lived. Perhaps that world had gone on, it would always go on, and Capt. Hunt and Alex had lived the life together that was still just over the horizon for her and Gene.

_I need to know_. She looked up at the ceiling of her bedroom, making a silent plea to God or Fate or whatever force had sent her reeling through time. She couldn't bear the thought of that world simply being snuffed out when she left it. She and Captain Hunt had found peace in that other time and place, hadn't they? They had earned it. And perhaps, if they had found it in 1917 against those odds, she and Gene could find it now. _Please. I need to know._

She lay that way until a restless sleep overtook her again. She could feel herself moving as if through a tunnel. There were a series of images at first. Black and white, flickering and faded, like old films. She could see herself in them. Captain Hunt and the Canadian doctor. Frantic voices. The flash of a scalpel.

Then she seemed to be drifting again, moving forward. The image faded again, softened.

She saw a house with a fence and a garden and a little boy playing in it. Then he was joined by another little boy. Both of them the image of their father. Then they were followed by another boy who came into the world too soon and left it again on the same bitter January day. They grieved, but they had been made strong by things that had come before, and their tragedy knit them closer together. And then a year later, there was a girl who favoured her mother. She was called Jane, which was close enough to 'Gene' to please her father.

There were wood fires and Christmases round the tree. Crackers and paper hats. There were measles and mumps and endless nights at bedsides, worrying and waiting for fevers to break. Then the distant sound of drums, the world plunged into darkness again. There were prayers for sons who marched off to war and rejoicing when they came home again.

And then there was peace, and she felt herself floating away again. Gene was there with her, he had always been there, and they drifted together. The images slowed, faded, until they were left with one last picture. Children, grandchildren, gathered around. Smiling, laughing. And then they were floating again, drifting away, until they were swallowed up in the light.

She woke up with a start. Her heart was racing, and she blinked her eyes as they adjusted to the narrow light. She was here in her room. Next to Gene. She was here in 1982. She understood now that she had been put to rest exactly where she was meant to be.

The bedside lamp clicked on, and Gene sat up next to her, his eyes full of concern. "Bolly…what is it? You okay?"

She nodded, unable to speak, and she realised then that she was crying. "I'm fine. It's just…I had a dream again."

"That same one. About you and me."

"Yes…"

He was quiet for a moment and then stroked at her chin with his thumb. "Y'know how it ends now?"

"Yes," she said, giving him a watery smile in the half-light. "Yes, I think I do."

**THE END**


End file.
